Day One is a private 📝journaling app first released in March 2011 by Bloom Built, the company of founder Paul Mayne, and owned by Automattic since June 2021. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Android, Windows, and the web under a 📝freemium model: free to use, with a paid Gold subscription. Entries combine text with photos, video, audio, and automatic metadata such as location, weather, and time.
Mayne built Day One around his own need for a private, low-friction place to record memories, and the app won Apple's Mac App of the Year in 2012 and an Apple Design Award in 2014. In June 2017 it replaced its earlier iCloud and Dropbox syncing with its own sync service and added end-to-end encryption after two years of development. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, kept Mayne leading the team after the 2021 acquisition, and a Windows app followed in March 2025. Day One is positioned as a dedicated journal for personal reflection rather than a general notes tool, setting it apart from writing apps such as 📝Bear, networked daily-note tools such as 📝Reflect, and knowledge platforms such as 📝MythOS whose daily memos double as a journal.
I kept my journals in Day One in 2017: morning gratitude and evening reflection entries, plus side journals for thoughts, concepts, and lines worth keeping. In June 2026 📝BrianBot migrated that export into MythOS, where those days now sit beside my Bear and Reflect years as one continuous journal.
Key Features
- On This Day — resurfaces entries written on the same date in earlier years.
- Rich media entries — photos, video, and audio alongside text, with automatic location, weather, and time metadata.
- End-to-end encryption — encrypted sync introduced in 2017, plus passcode and biometric locks on device.
- Markdown authoring — entries support 📝Markdown formatting for structure and emphasis.
- Book Printing — turns a journal into a printed, bound book.