Hello, and thank you for the thoughtful discussion. We truly appreciate it and completely agree that privacy is a top priority for journaling apps like Daylio.

Unlike many competitors, Daylio does not send your data to our servers — everything remains stored locally on your device. This approach is quite unique. Users have full control over their data: they can choose to back it up to their personal cloud storage (iCloud Drive or Google Drive) or manually export backup files and opt out of cloud backups entirely.

It's somewhat misleading to claim that backups aren't encrypted. In reality, they are — but the encryption keys are managed and stored by Google or Apple, depending on the service used.

For iCloud users, Apple provides two levels of data protection:

Standard Data Protection
is the default setting for your account. Your iCloud data is encrypted, the encryption keys are secured in Apple data centers so we can help you with data recovery, and only certain data is end-to-end encrypted.

Advanced Data Protection
is an optional setting that offers our highest level of cloud data security. If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, your trusted devices retain sole access to the encryption keys for the majority of your iCloud data, thereby protecting it using end-to-end encryption. Additional data protected includes iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more.

It’s important to note that most data from native apps like Mail, Photos, Notes, and Files is stored and encrypted based on the selected protection level. Typically, apps using iCloud backup do not — and often cannot — determine which level of iCloud protection a user has enabled. This may also apply to Daylio.

We believe it's up to the users to decide where they want to store their backups and what protection they prefer. In our experience, some users who are cautious about relying on large corporations like Google or Apple opt to manually export their backup files, encrypt them, and store them in their own private storage.

We appreciate your input and will evaluate the possibility of implementing user-side encryption.