Day One is the incumbent for a reason: a decade of polish, apps on every platform, and end-to-end encryption. If you're here, something still made you search for an alternative — usually the subscription, or the fact that after all these years, the journal still only knows what you type into it.
Retrography starts from the opposite premise: the journal writes itself. Places with arrival and leaving times, photos placed at the hour you took them, the music you played, sleep and workouts — assembled into one page per day, automatically. Writing is the layer on top, not the price of entry.
| Retrography | Day One | |
|---|---|---|
| Price model | Free start, one-time unlock | Subscription for the full app |
| Days assemble themselves (places, photos, music, health) | Yes, automatically | Suggestions you add by hand |
| Passive location log with arrival & leaving times | Yes | No |
| Sleep, steps, workouts on the day | Yes | Partly, via suggestions |
| Music history on the day | Spotify, Last.fm, Shazam button | No |
| On This Day | The whole day, rebuilt | Yes |
| Voice notes transcribed on-device | Yes (Whisper, offline) | Audio entries, cloud transcription |
| Where your data lives | Your phone + your own iCloud | Vendor cloud (end-to-end encrypted) |
| Export | Full JSON archive + vector PDFs | JSON export |
| Import from the other app | Yes, full Day One import | No Retrography import |
| Platforms | iPhone, Apple Watch, CarPlay — iPad & Mac coming | iOS, Android, Mac, web |
| Templates, multiple journals, shared journals | No | Yes |
Where Day One honestly wins: if you need Android or web access, shared or multiple journals, and templates, Day One is the mature multi-platform choice. Retrography ships on iPhone, Apple Watch, and CarPlay today, with iPad and Mac versions on the way — but Android isn't on our roadmap. Its end-to-end encrypted cloud is also a real feature, though it means your archive lives on their servers; ours lives on your phone and your own iCloud, with no vendor in the middle.
Where Retrography wins: the automatic day, the passive location log, music on the timeline, on-device voice transcription — and the economics: free to start, one flat unlock for your full history, no meter running on your own memories.
Switching is a real path, not a leap: the importer carries your Day One entries over — text, titles, dates, photos, locations, even the weather and your starred entries. And if you ever leave Retrography, everything exports back out. A journal you can leave is the only kind worth moving into.