Every few months the same post climbs r/appleJournal: please, Apple, add “On This Day.” It came up again right after the WWDC keynote — three years since Journal shipped, and still nothing.
I get why people keep asking. A journal you only ever write into gets boring fast. The thing that pulls you back is seeing what you wrote — and shot, and where you were — a year ago, or five. People in that thread are tagging every entry’s title with the date by hand (#9june) just to fake a look-back; others gave up and went back to Day One or Everlog because at least those show you your old entries.
Retrography has done On This Day since day one, with one difference: it doesn’t only resurface text you typed. It rebuilds the whole day from what your phone already saved — the photos, the places you went, the weather, the workouts, the music — and puts your journal entry next to it. So it’s worth opening in your first week, before you’ve written much at all. It reaches back across last week, last month, and one through five years.
The clip above is one day, no narration: last year on this date for Mei — one of the built-in demo profiles — a Thursday in Singapore.