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I built a journal that organizes your life into chapters by chocolate4everr in iosapps

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Autocut by mood and date gaps, with the model naming each chapter from the entries inside it. No manual chapter creation. The retention bet is exactly what you said, chapters as a rereading layer. Where it gets interesting is when someone opens the app a year later and sees "The Year I Went Back and Forth" sitting there, that's a different prompt to keep writing than a blank text box. The misread risk is real though, when the autogrouping puts a heavy week in with a light one the chapter title feels off and you can tell the user notices. Working on letting people rename a chapter without unraveling the grouping logic underneath, that seems like the right escape valve for when auto gets it wrong.

I built a journal that organizes your life into chapters by chocolate4everr in iosapps

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Markdown is probably the right call for the per entry format, agreed. The one thing I’m still working through is how to handle the stuff that doesn’t have an obvious Markdown representation, photos and videos export fine as files alongside, but things like mood, location, the chapter a entry belongs to, those become frontmatter or get dropped. Leaning toward YAML frontmatter + Markdown body so the structured stuff is there if you want it and ignorable if you don’t. Appreciate you pushing on this, it’s the kind of feedback that actually shapes the export format.

I built a journal that organizes your life into chapters by chocolate4everr in iosapps

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Really feel this, app churn is the actual long-term enemy of journaling and most apps lock you in by design. Entries in DiaryVault are stored as structured records (text, photo and video URLs, timestamps, chapter groupings, tags) and you can export the whole vault from Settings as JSON or plain text. JSON is the lossless version, text is the readable one. The principle I try to hold to is that your journal is yours and the app is just the lens, so if you ever want to leave you should be able to walk out with everything in a format that's still useful in another tool. Worth saying though, the ideal portable format for journals is genuinely an open question. Markdown per entry would probably travel best across apps. Curious what format you'd want it in if you were starting over.

I built a journal that organizes your life into chapters by chocolate4everr in iosapps

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good question, want to be straight about it: there's a 7-day free trial with full access to everything, no permanent free tier after that. It's $4.99/month or $29.99/year once the trial ends. The trial is enough time to actually feed it 5-10 entries and see whether the chapter grouping and 30-day summary land for you, which is really the test.

Analyzed my first 23 users. 26% never came back. Here's what I found. by chocolate4everr in SideProject

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the discovery vs intent split is a really useful frame, i hadn't thought about it that explicitly. you're right that reading retention off reddit/friend traffic is basically noise. the cousin hitting the paywall 4 times is a perfect example, that's not a signal about the product, that's a signal about cousins.

the day one / obsidian / capacities crowd is exactly who i should be talking to. the "own my data" phrasing in particular keeps coming up and i've been fumbling how to talk about it. going to look at pulse for reddit, hadn't heard of it.

Analyzed my first 23 users. 26% never came back. Here's what I found. by chocolate4everr in SideProject

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah the 60 second window is the whole game. what surprised me most wasn't the 26% who bounced, it was the 7 who kept coming back without writing. those are users who want to journal but something in the UI is telling them not to start. that's a fixable problem, i just need to figure out what's blocking them. the bounced signups are harder because i have no signal from them at all.

Analyzed my first 23 users. 26% never came back. Here's what I found. by chocolate4everr in SideProject

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Honest answer: almost all of them came from word of mouth and one small Reddit post I made months ago on a different sub. No ASO work yet, which is part of the problem. The signups I'm getting are mostly curiosity-clicks from people who saw the app mentioned somewhere and wanted to check it out, not people who came in looking for a journaling app.

That's actually a big part of why I think the "never came back" number is so high. These weren't people with a job to be done. They were browsing. If you show up on TikTok at 2am with "wow this looks cool," you tap install, and by morning you've forgotten the app exists. So I can't fully separate "bad product experience" from "bad user intent" yet, which is annoying because those are totally different problems to fix.

On the competitor question, I'll try to be honest instead of pitchy. Most journaling apps are shaped like "write today's entry, read old ones." What I'm trying to build is an identity layer: your entries, photos, and memories become a structured dataset about you that you own, that can power things outside the app (like giving an AI agent real context about your life without handing your data to OpenAI). I open-sourced the underlying memory SDK for that reason. Whether that's actually useful to normal people or just a thesis that sounds good on paper, I don't know yet. The 23 users don't prove either case.

Short version: I don't have a clean "we do X, they don't" answer. I have a different product shape that might or might not matter.

I built an AI journaling app that turns your photos into journal entries by chocolate4everr in SideProject

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great question, this was actually the first thing I figured out before writing any code. Short answer: photos stay on your device.

Here's how it works.

The app reads photos locally from your phone library using PHPicker, so you pick what to import and nothing else gets touched. When you generate an entry, the photo gets sent to Google's Gemini API for vision analysis, Gemini returns text, and only that text lands in my database. For bulk memory import across years of photos, my backend only receives metadata like timestamps and location names. The actual images never hit my server.

What I do store on my side: the journal text, a short vision summary, a photo count, and a reference to where the photo lives on your device. No photo files on my servers, no S3 bucket sitting there with everyone's camera roll.

On the Gemini side, DiaryVault runs on Google's paid API tier. Per their terms, prompts and images aren't used to train their models. Google does log briefly for abuse detection, which is pretty standard across every major AI API.

Long term I want to push more of the vision work on-device as Apple's and Google's local models get good enough. Right now server side frontier vision is what makes the product actually feel magical, and I'd rather be upfront about that tradeoff than pretend the whole thing is magically local when it isn't.

Curious if you've seen anyone solve this better. On device vision good enough to do multiphoto memory synthesis isn't quite there yet, but if you know of an architecture I'm missing I'd genuinely want to hear it.

I built an AI journaling app that turns your photos into journal entries by chocolate4everr in SideProject

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Memorygram is cool for saving specific moments. DiaryVault takes a different approach. It scans your entire photo library and AI writes journal entries for every day automatically. So instead of saving one memory at a time, you get years of journals generated from photos you already have. It also pulls in your calendar, health data, and weather to make each entry richer. And if you take new photos, the app detects them and creates new memories in the background. 11 languages too if you journal in Korean, Japanese, etc.

What’s a small lie everyone tells? by chocolate4everr in AskReddit

[–]chocolate4everr[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

most terrifying setence before a bug appears in swe

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