A diary nobodycan read but you.
Write freely. Every entry is encrypted on your phone before it goes anywhere, then stored in your cloud — not ours. We literally can't read it. No prompts, no templates, no AI looking over your shoulder. Just write.
The truth about your diary apps
0
of your words sit on our servers in a form anyone can read.
Zero-knowledge by design — every entry is end-to-end encrypted with a key only you hold.
Most journaling and notes apps keep your entries in plain text on their servers — readable by their staff, their partners, a future breach, or a subpoena. Simple Journal encrypts every word on your device first. What reaches our servers is scrambled text we have no way to unlock.
A diary should keep your secrets. This one has no choice.
End-to-end encrypted
Encrypted on your phone.
Before it goes anywhere.
Even we can't read it.
Your password derives the key, right on your device — it's never sent to us. Everything we store is ciphertext. There's no master key on our side, because there's no us in the loop.
Zero-knowledge by design
Locked with your password
It derives the encryption key on your device. We never receive it.
Encrypted before it leaves
Entries are scrambled on your phone. Our servers only ever see ciphertext.
Opened only by you
Face ID or your password, on your own devices. No backdoor, no exceptions.
Forget your password while signed out everywhere and even we can't recover it. That's not a flaw — it's the whole promise.
No prompts. No pressure.
No templates.
Just write.
Open the app and there's a blank page waiting — not a questionnaire. Write a sentence or a thousand words. Add a photo, a voice note, a place, a mood, or none of it. Markdown if you like. The page never tells you what to feel.
- Free-form
- Markdown
- Photos & voice
- No AI reading along
Your entries aren't training data. No model is reading them — because we can't read them either.
You own the storage
Your journal lives
where you choose.
Sync your encrypted entries to your own cloud, or keep them on your phone alone. We never hold the only copy of your journal — and never a readable one.
Your cloud
Encrypted sync
Across your devices. Our server stores only ciphertext.
Local only
This device
Nothing ever leaves your phone. No account needed.
Your key
Face ID + password
Derived on-device — never uploaded, never ours.
Reinstall while signed out of everything and there's no way back in — for you or for us. Real privacy costs a safety net. We think it's a fair trade.
Mood, quietly tracked
A year of you,
in color.
When you save an entry, you can tap a mood — five taps, fully optional. Over weeks it fills in a Year-in-Pixels: a quiet calendar of how you actually felt, no charts to decode, no score to chase.
The only person grading your year is you.
Your whole story, searchable
Find any day.
Relive any year.
A mood-tinted calendar, full-text search, and tags make every entry easy to find — all of it indexed on your device. And "On This Day" quietly resurfaces what you wrote on this date in years past.
"On this day, two years ago — I was so sure that would never work out. Look at me now."
Searchable everywhere, decrypted nowhere but your own screen.
Locked tight
Locked the moment you look away.
Open with Face ID or a fingerprint. Auto-lock after a set time. A panic gesture that drops to a neutral lock screen if someone's watching. Even a decoy journal with its own password, for when you need one.
Privacy isn't a setting you go hunting for here. It's the default you'd have to turn off.
Why it stays private
Built to forget you,
not to know you.
End-to-end encrypted
Every entry is scrambled on your device with a key only you hold. We store ciphertext, never words.
Stored in your cloud
Sync to your own Drive or iCloud, or keep it all local. We never hold the only copy.
Locked & panic-ready
Face ID, auto-lock, a shake-to-lock panic gesture, and an optional decoy journal.
Just write
Free-form text, photos, voice, mood. No prompts, no AI reading along, no judgment.
FAQ
Honest answers about your privacy.
- Can you really not read my journal?
- Correct. Entries are encrypted on your device with a key derived from your password, which never leaves your phone. Our servers only ever receive ciphertext. There's no master key on our side and no admin panel that decrypts your words — the architecture makes it impossible, not just against policy.
- What happens if I forget my password?
- Your password is saved to iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager when you create it, so any device signed into the same cloud account can autofill it. But if you forget it and you're signed out everywhere, your journal can't be recovered — not even by us. That's the honest cost of nobody-can-read-it encryption.
- Where exactly is my data stored?
- Encrypted entries sync to your own cloud — your Google Drive or iCloud — or, if you prefer, stay only on your device. Either way, what's stored is ciphertext. We never hold the single copy of your journal, and never a readable one.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Guest mode keeps everything on your device with no account at all. An account is optional — it only coordinates encrypted sync across your devices. It's never required to write or read your entries, and it never gives us the ability to read them.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. Writing, reading, search, and your calendar all work fully offline — the index lives on your device. Sync just catches up the encrypted entries when you're back online.
- Is there AI reading my entries?
- No. There's no model analyzing your writing, because we can't read it in the first place. If on-device, opt-in features ever arrive, they'll run entirely on your phone — never by sending your words to a server.
- Who builds Simple Journal?
- Simple Journal is built and maintained by SimpleApps — the same one-person studio behind Simple Reminder, Simple Photographer 101, Simple Gym, and Simple Habit Tracker. Indie, no investors, no dark patterns, no data to sell. simpleapps.ai.
