Day One App Reviews

I previously wrote about my desire to journal more frequently both personally and professionally. I had expressed concerns about issues of accessibility for VOiceOver users. Those issues have been addressed and I can now confidently recommend Day One for all your journaling needs. I know some have expressed concerns about the Day One sync service; however, I know there are efforts underway to provide users a higher level of assurance of data security by greater level of encryption. If you want a solid and reliable journaling app, Day One is exactly what you are looking for, IMHO.

First off I have to say that ‘Day 1-2’ is a really good application to use for a journal. It will probably do everything you want and more. I also purchased Capture 365 so I could make an intelligent decision on what journaling app I want to use. Day 1-2 does more than Caoture 365 but for some reason I decided to use the other one for my journal. I don’t know why,, It may be something a simple as the layout of the screen.. The price of both applications isn’t that much for something you’re going to use every day and both applications will allow for importing data from the other. Anyone thinking about starting a journal might find it useful to purchase both, play with them and decide which one they like better. IMHO I’m just a guy who likes to play with apps to see how they work for me and how the developers works. Sometimes the developers mind and mine are on the same page and sometimes they’re not.

You have to be kidding me. I paid significant $ for this lame app, which basically combines on a daily basis some text with some pictures and little more. Then I thought, ok, hopefully, this will make a nice Web page automatically updated with my entries that I’ll be able to share with friends and family. When I finally figured out the entirely unintuitive ‘preference’ for syncing, using my Apple Id miserably failed (sign-in stayed stuck forever). Ok, so I patiently created my own account, this worked, my entry did sync and… I can’t publish in any form whatsoever? AH COME ON. You don’t sell a journaling app which isn’t even capable of emulating a basic (and free) blog entry, people… Count me out.

I’ve been a Day One (Classic) user for over two years, and switched over to Day One 2.0 a couple of months ago. I could focus on how awful 2.0 is compared to Classic when it comes to simplicity and ease of use when making daily written entries, but I have a bigger issue now. About three weeks ago, I opened Day One and noticed that I had no entries showing for the month, when I’d made entries most every day. I started looking around, and found that every single entry I’d made for the past two + years —over 400 entries— was gone. All 400+ entries had disappeared as if I’d never made them. My husband and I both tried to locate them, to no avail. We contacted support for help, and got no reply within the 48-hr response time. We contacted them again, and noticed that response time had changed to up to 5 days. Hmm. So we waited patiently, but still no response. After 5 days, we sent another help request which went unanswered. Now, THREE WEEKS LATER, we still haven’t received a single reply from the dozens of help requests that have been sent (we started sending them every day or two after the first 10 days of patient waiting and no response). Meanwhile, all 400+ entries are STILL missing, and I’ve lost records of everything from my children’s milestones to gardening & planting date info, to health and medicine records, to the recording of our family’s happenings over the past two+ years. And not a word from anyone at Day One. No way to contact them by phone. So, please, beware this company; when there’s a problem, they don’t back up their product, and they don’t answer weeks’ worth of help requests.

I have been a fan of DAYONE for a few years now, but with the ability to have multiple journals, I am a SUPER FAN! I now have a 6 journals, one for me and each of my kids. I am writing memories and recording everyday moments for each kid in their own journal, which I will print out and give to them as a gift someday. The cherry on top is that while I can export each journal individually, I can also import “all entries” and keep each letter/entry as part of my own printed journal. I have tried doing this in a variety of ways before DAYONE, but now everything is so streamlined, and in the end I have my own copy of everything I have written to my family. Wahoo! Thank you DAYONE!

Removing iCloud sync from this version has turned a very promising upgrade into a wasted $20 for for me. I don’t trust the developer’s cloud service to maintain my privacy and certainly don’t accept their excuses of technical limitations in not being able to support iCloud sync. The company expects us to sync our most intimate journal entries unencrypted to a hosted server maintied by a relativly small development company with no intenal oversight to prevent leaks, hacks or a sizable legal warchest to protect against abusive discovery requests from the goverment or third parties. ******** Update: New version still missing iCloud sync. No change of my original opinion and review. ******** Update2: New version still missing iCloud sync. No change of my original opinion and review.

I had a rocky start, but support worked with me to figure out my problem. I’m very impressed with this journal. Being able to record a thought or experience when you only have your IPhone with you, and then having it sync to your Mac is just the best! The markup feature is great to have as well. I haven’t checked out all of the features yet, but what I’ve found so far is... more function, more fun, and less complicated than any other journaling app out there.

I do not like that I can not choose which cloud service to sync. I prefer iCloud so I have control. I do like multiple journals

Everything’s good about the mac version - except for not having the option to swap to celsius for the weather. The iOS version adopted this a long time ago!

I absolutely love Day One! I previously used Evernote as my journal, but after a while, mixing business stuff, with documents, and personal journal entries got daunting. I love Day One cause it allows me to keep it all seperate. One thing I would love to see if the ability to edit the tags names. I have some tags that I mispelled, but can’t edit them. Other than that, I love this app. It’s changed my life. It’s allowd me to take a step back and appreciate my life a bit more.

I bought this version because it was on sale and I’d like to support the developer. However, I haven’t even launched the application, prefering to keep on using Day One Classic since I know where the data is going and I trust where it currently resides. Once I read that the latest version includes encryption or some other sync provider that I trust I will concider using it. …which makes me sad, I like the sound of so many new features, but my journal entries are mine, not yours. If I wanted them to be public I would have blogged or put them on Facebook.

This is a very nice app on the face of it, and it became very popular. Then the developer suddenly removed iCloud and Dropbox syncing options from the latest version of the app, and instead swiched to only offering their own sync service, which is currently free for the moment. The developer is paying to host their sync service on AWS (Amazon). Who do you think is eventually going to have to pay for it, at a premium? Now, is encryption actually implemented, locally, or on the deveroper’s sync server? Nope. Some of the developer’s staff currently have access to all sync’d journals. That also means that sync’d, unencrypted journal data is subject to all legal discovery processes, incliuding divorce and child custody proceedings, etc. Can you, as a user, still easily directly access your sync’d journal files, now on the developer’s rented AWS server, in order to delete them, if you feel so inclined for any reason? What do you think? For some reason, these changes, and other issues, angered many long-time users. In response, the developer finially proposed eventually enabling some form of encryption, perhaps later this year. This is a very, very nice application. On the face of it.

I write every day. With the upgrade, I anticipated planned obsolence of the old version. I figured it would be better to upgrade now before the old version gets buggy. The new one is infested with bugs. Many features that were simple before now behave unexpectedly. The iOS version made the typing space so small that it is like writing text messages. I contacted their support team and they took a long time to respond. I suspect many people are frustrated because journaling is an intimate daily habit and they have made using their software an obstacle to it. I was giving them a chance until just today, the sync has gone haywire and my computer is tangled up with old and new folders. I am exporting all to PDF and going back to writing a journal in word. It isn’t that much money, but at $70 this is the most I have paid a company for apps and the last month of using this “upgrade” has been extremely frustrating and ultimately futile.

Syncing has not worked for days. You must use their sync service. Nor can I log into my account on line. Support messages say it will take days before they can get around to answering my request for help. I think it unethical that Apple touts this application without a concern for whether it is sound or not. I expected to be able to trust an “editors pick” designation. Hogwash! I am dissapointed in the app and in Apple for essentially recomending it.

This app does everything I want it to do. I can capture and organize my thoughts. It has a nice balance of features and an even better balance of limitations. The sync works wonderfully, BUT encryption is not provided currently. I’d feel a lot better about a journal app if privacy became a priority. Keep up the great work on this great product, but please add encryption asap. Would have given 5 stars easily.

I feel uncomfortable using 3rd party servers

Love the app, but only had it a week or so and sync has been down pretty consistently. Unfortunate, because i really like the app. Too bad they switched sync solutions to one that is not working. I hope they work it out soon, becuase I do like the app. But this is pretty important. It make journalling easy and automatic. I use other writing apps based on icloud sync and they work perfectly, Cant understand why developer switched sync solutions.

Been a user since er, day one. My key concern with the first version was that the password protection didn’t mean anything to anyone who knows where to look for the journal entries. These entries will be viewable in plain text. The new version came and with it, cost really a lot more but this surely has to do with the fact that Day One is now owning the syncing process. However, things seem to be breaking already - as I write this, the sync has been not working for perhaps 12 hours, likely more. When things fail like that, the very least Day One could do is to inform its users that they are on it and provide proactive updates. I have invested so much trust in sharing the most private moments of my life with Day One, but as of right now, I am really rather worried. Perhaps password protected Word docs are a better solution than this…

Version 2 is a good app, but not much better than version 1 for my uses, the differences being better interface and design, but my complaint is switching from iCloud sync to their own server without a backup or alternative of using iCloud is a minus for me since it’s been down for 2 days today. I run both versions on my iPhone and under normal conditions, the sync time difference in minimal, but when theirs is down, iCloud would still be there for users. They should add it back.

I loved Day One Classic (still do, and will continue to use it until the company stops its support—which will probably be sooner rather than later) and was pleased to hear the the update contained some long-clamored for features (multiple photo entry and more than one journal). But this “upgrade” is terrible. There is not a single thing that is truly an improvment over the original or worth the steep price. My primary issue, like most reviewers, is the loss of Dropbox/iCloud sync. I’m sorry, DayOne, but you have not sufficiently earned the trust of your users to ask them to entust their thoughts to your own system. Everyday this becomes a more glaring flaw, as DayOne’s inabilty to resolve user problems (or lack of interest in doing so) becomes more and more clear. I’ve been watching for any indication that the company is rethinking this. From what I can tell—after two months of a buggy rollout and angry users—they’re just ignoring it, and pointing to completley unsubstantiated claims that the majority of their users had problems with the old system and love the new one. NOT a way to gain or retain customer trust. I also have a real problem with the steep pricetag. I don’t mind paying for quality and the original app was a very fine product. But what exactly are users paying $29+ for? The ability to have multiple journals and add more than one photo? The price is made even more offensive by the fact that so many DayOne users use the app across mutiple devices, and have to pay for each and every one. Let me repeat, I do not mind paying for a product, and I’ll pay well for a quality one, but this is just a rip off. Like others, I have also experienced a lot of bugs in the new version (I have since abandoned it entirely). The syncing is weird, when it works, and entries go missing with alarming regularity. This leads me to my last point, DayOne’s ineffective, and possibly thoroughly indifferent, user support. A few weeks after I upgraded, two very lengthy entries just disappeared from my journal. As per the online FAQ, I waited two days to see if the journal had synced and the entries were backed up somewhere. Nope. I emailed user support, which promises to respond within a couple business days. Nearly two weeks later, I finally heard something. The tech guy was very polite, but his advice consisted in walking me through the steps I’d already followed from the FAQ. Still no results. FInally he told me to backup everything (had already done so) and delete the journal. Already thoroughly leery of this process, I moved everything to PDFs before doing so. I was right to do so. EVERYTHING disappeared. My conclusions from all of this: At best, DayOne 2.0 is not ready for prime time and Bloom is clearly entirely out of its depth. The long user support wait time, which others have commented on as well, and the basic advice given, suggest to me that Bloom didn’t at all anticipate this, and for whatever reason, released the new version before it was thorougly tested and ready. To do all of this (or rather, not do it), and simultaneously ask users to trust their servers? That’s a joke, right?