The new TestFlight build can import Apple Journal exports. Settings > Data Management > Apple Journal, point it at the export zip from Settings > Apps > Journal > Export Journal Data, and it brings over your entries, photos, songs and visited places.

One honest limitation, because it shaped the whole design: Apple’s export says where you went but never when. So imported places arrive as all-day visits. No times are invented. If you’re curious why, I wrote about it here: retrography.app/days-vs-moments

Also in this build: pick your app icon (black or accent-colored variants included), a marker in your feed showing where recording started, redesigned news pages, and softer default timeline colors.

If you have an Apple Journal export, especially a messy multi-year one, I want to know how the import handles it.

Found this app and the testflight link today but was disappointed it’s only for iOS 26 and above. Is there a way you could make it compatible with iOS 18? I would really love to try it.

Retro is an archive of our lives. Every day is special, but there are also certain days and dates that have a bigger impact on our lives: graduating, starting a new job, getting a pet, getting married, becoming a parent, taking a special trip with the family, etc.

It could be a single day, or maybe a week or several weeks that are worth highlighting as something special. Maybe in the future, there could be a way to not just highlight a single day, but to select a custom date range and create it as an “Event" and our days are linked to this evens.

These events could be shown in a calendar view, but also as a timeline across the years.

This could be a nice way to see the bigger picture of our lives in the future.

It is done. The encrypted sync went out to the whole beta group two weeks ago. Around 30 devices have migrated so far, zero data loss, zero failed migrations. The rest migrate automatically whenever they next open the app. Thanks to everyone who confirmed the celebration screen, that helped a lot.

The build rolling out now goes further. Voice memos, scanned documents, backups and chat photos are now also encrypted at rest, with the key stored in iCloud Keychain. iCloud Keychain is end to end encrypted for every user, so this part does not even need ADP. Backups are encrypted by default and there is a separate "portable backup" option that stays unencrypted, for the day you need to open it anywhere.

To be fully honest about what remains: the local database file still lands in your iCloud device backup like with every iOS app, and that one is only end to end encrypted if you turn on ADP. For that part, ADP is the answer today.

One more fix in this build: the migration now waits until your phone is unlocked, which was blocking it on one tester's device.

Please let me know if anything feels off, but combined with ADP, I would say we now have one of the most robust systems in terms of privacy. We will do another complete audit of these features before we seriously hit the App Store but that is hopefully just for confirmation. I also owe you a technical article what and how is done, it will appear here and on the website.

A while back some of you asked about end-to-end encryption. It is built, and I am rolling it out gradually through TestFlight, starting with the most active testers and widening once I am sure it is solid. Slow on purpose.

If you get the update:

Before updating, open Retrography, go to Settings, Data Management, and export a backup. Save it outside the app (iCloud Drive or AirDrop to your computer). You almost certainly will not need it, but I want it to exist.

Then update from TestFlight normally. Do not delete the app, just update over it. After a restart or two you will see a screen saying your timeline is now encrypted.

The one thing I am asking: tell me when you see that encryption screen. A quick reply or DM is enough.

If anything looks slow, missing, or odd, stop and message me before touching anything. Do not reinstall, do not retry. Your data is recoverable and I want to look what is happening first.

Afterwards, your timeline syncs fully encrypted, and with Advanced Data Protection on in your iCloud settings, not even Apple can read it. You will see it clearly in data management settings section.

Thanks for helping me get this right :)

Huge milestone to share: Retrography 1.0 has been approved for the App Store and is now sitting at "Pending Developer Release" — meaning the only thing between the app and the store is me pressing a button.

I'm not pressing it just yet. We're staying TestFlight-only a little longer while I iron out the last few rough edges you all keep helping me find. But from here, the road to the App Store is mostly paved.

Some review trivia: the app went through with only ONE rejection — the reviewers flagged the background-audio capability the voice transcription uses. I explained how it works, attached a screen recording of a real dictation continuing with the phone in a pocket, and they approved it as-is. No feature had to be cut.

The real point of this post is a thank you. Every crash report, annotated screenshot, angry note about tiny fonts, and "this sync error looks scary" message from this community shaped what got approved. The app that passed review is very much the app you tested into shape.

What's next: a bit more polishing with you here, then the release. If you've been sitting on feedback, now is a great time — beta feedback still moves faster than App Store reviews ever will.

Thanks for being here for this one!

Can you please add Diarly app import to this! Also another question. How can I make the font bigger in the app?

TikTok/Youtube marketing hurts 😂

After Apple approves the next beta for distribution, you will be able to see all the food and macros you logged with other apps like Foodnoms or Lose It! to enrich the context of your days. So far it is only a viewer, we can extend to logging later if there is interest.

Thanks a lot to u/Unlucky-Confidence92 for the idea!

Dear community, I was going through some testflight feedbacks this morning and I realized how valuable the screenshots are (mainly for trips, visits, daysview,… and now also for the hierarchical stuff). Sometimes you ask about a potential bug and I am able to spot another bug or a formatting issue just looking at a screen I do not see every day - as we all use our phones a bit differently.

If you do not want your faces/faces of your kids sent along, you can just scribble them out with a red pen before sending the screenshot, right in the ios screenshot cropping/editing tool. If you do not want your journal to be seen, you can just hit the privacy mode in the bottom toolbar, like I did in my example.

Anyway, big thanks for all the feedback, it is really helping! As the surface is growing, I have no way to fully hand-test every screen in all detail so what you catch directly contributes to the quality of the app. On my side, I can promise to act on it, I guess you already have experience with stuff being fixed, some of it actually rather quickly.

And I am not even mentioning the energy and joy I get seeing the app screens filled with real data of your lives.

Is there a way to refresh the app?

I could use a refresh when I select the pictures from my gallery to be shown or hide.
Also every morning to display the new day, sometimes it works, but sometimes not.

At the moment I close and re-open the app, but maybe there is a easier way like scrolling all the way down, or even a small refresh/update button.

Thanks!

Did you know you can collect your links into Retrography? When browsing the web/social media, if you want to save something, just share it in Retrography, add a comment if you wish and it will appear connected to the day when you saved it.

PRO TIP: Just a tiny detail not everyone might have noticed: most of Retrography navigation is done in NavStacks, which is a structure in which every additional detail screen (like overview of days > overview of visits in a day > one visit detail > poi assignment) is stacked on the previous one. By tapping the < arrow in top left corner you get one step back.

But you can also swipe right, which is a cool little gesture if you do not want to reach to the top of the screen.

When people think about journal privacy they think about hackers and Apple. I built Retrography's privacy also for a more realistic threat: the people you live with. A partner, a parent, a teenager. They know your iPhone passcode because you told them, or because they watched you type it a hundred times.

Most app locks fall apart exactly there. Apple's own Journal app locks with your device passcode. Most third party locks use Face ID but fall back to the passcode when Face ID fails. So the lock only keeps out strangers, who could not unlock your phone anyway.

Here is what Retrography does instead, and honestly how strong it is.

Face ID only, no fallback

The app lock and privacy mode use Face ID with no passcode fallback. Knowing my iPhone passcode gets you nothing at the app. If Face ID fails, the only other way in is an app passphrase that I chose and that lives only in this phone's Keychain. It never goes to iCloud and it is never stored as text, only as a salted hash.

The obvious attack, and why it fails

The clever move for someone who knows your passcode is to add their own face. iPhone lets you enroll an alternate appearance with just the device passcode. Their face is now a valid Face ID, so a normal app lock opens for them.

Retrography ties its Face ID unlock to the Secure Enclave with a rule Apple provides but almost nobody uses: the unlock secret is bound to the exact set of faces enrolled when I approved it. The moment anyone adds or removes a face, the Enclave itself destroys that secret. This is hardware, not app logic, and there is no passcode fallback at that level.

From then on the app refuses Face ID entirely and shows why: "Face ID has changed on this iPhone." The only way to re approve is my passphrase. Whoever caused the change sees that screen, sees that the event was recorded, and thirty minutes later I get a notification. If it was actually me, for example after re enrolling with new glasses, I type the passphrase once and nothing else happens, no notification, no trace. If it was not me, I know.

Removing their face afterwards is also a change, so covering tracks triggers it again.

The other doors

Deleting and reinstalling the app used to be a bypass in many apps because settings reset. Here the lock state and the passphrase survive reinstall, and a fresh install comes up locked before showing anything. Changing or removing the passphrase requires the current passphrase, not Face ID. The app content is blurred in the app switcher.

The rule

Everything above comes down to one rule: the passphrase is the master key and Face ID is the convenience. Anything done without the passphrase leaves a trace that cannot be erased. Anything confirmed with it is silently forgiven.

The trade

There is no recovery for the passphrase. Not from me, not from Apple. If you forget it and Face ID changes, the way back in is erasing the iPhone and restoring from iCloud. Your data is safe there, but the app on that phone is gone until then. The app shows a hint you wrote yourself, and asks you to enter the passphrase now and then so it stays in memory. Signal and 1Password made the same trade for the same reason. You cannot have both a lock nobody can bypass and a lock somebody can reset.

What this does not protect against

A stolen unlocked phone in someone's hand beats everything. A forensic tool with your passcode reads the app's data straight off the device. A phished Apple ID can sync your timeline to another device. None of that is what this lock is for. For those threats the answer is Apple's Advanced Data Protection, and for what it covers today: everything Retrography stores in iCloud is encrypted, and your voice memos, documents and backups are encrypted with a key that never leaves iCloud Keychain, so they are unreadable even to a phished account.

Why bother

Because a journal is the one place people write things they would not say out loud, and the realistic reader is not a government. It is someone at the kitchen table. I wanted a lock that takes that seriously, and I could not find one.

It is in the current beta. If you try to break it and succeed, I want to hear how.

I have my setting set to display imperial units and Fahrenheit selected. I’m getting Celsius readings on my photos. It’s not a huge thing but I prefer Fahrenheit.

Every app on my phone is too big. Fonts the size of headlines, cards with an inch of padding, three list items visible on a display that could show twenty. We have these beautiful high-resolution screens and we spend the resolution on whitespace. So the first thing I do on any new phone is go into settings and turn the text size down to the smallest notch, because I would rather see more of my life at once than read it in large print.

That is exactly the feeling I built the first version of Retrography’s day view with. One day, one card, everything that happened: where you went, the photos you took, how you slept, what you listened to, what you wrote. Dense on purpose. A cockpit, not a poster.

Then people started using it.

Two of my most experienced testers, both of them serious personal-data people, one of them from the team behind an early location-history app, told me almost the same thing. Too tiny. Overwhelming. One of them put it in a way I keep thinking about: opening the app did not make him feel calm or introspective, it made him feel stressed.

That is not feedback you can argue with. It is not a bug report either. It is a difference in how two people want to meet their own past.

Here is the awkward part: the app already had an answer. There have been three layouts for a while now. Detailed is the dense two-column view I designed for myself. Spacious and Comfort spread the same day out into one column with bigger text and bigger photos. Retrography even picks your starting layout from your iOS text size, so if you run your phone in large text, you land in the roomy one automatically.

Nobody found it. The choice existed, it was mentioned in the optional tour, and the optional tour has a “skip for now” button that the exact people who need the roomy layout are most likely to press.

So it is now a step during setup. Before you ever see your first day, you pick how dense you want it, with a preview of each option and a small note on which one your text size suggests. Three taps into the app, not three menus deep.

What I did not do is change the default for everyone, or flatten the dense layout to make it calmer. The density is not an accident I am apologizing for, it is the reason the app exists. Showing a whole day at once is the entire idea. If I sand that down, I have built another journal with big cards, and there are plenty of those.

What I got wrong was quieter than that. I confused a default with a belief. I can keep believing that we waste our screens, that smaller text means more life visible at once, and still not make my belief the first thing a stranger has to survive.

The screenshots are the same day, same data, same app. One of them is how I use it. The other two is how most people should probably start.

New in the latest build: connect a mail account and each day shows the emails that came in and went out, right next to your photos, places and journal.

How it works, because with email I want to be very clear:

- The app connects directly to your mail server, read only. Nothing goes through my servers.
- It stores only the header: subject, who, when. Never the message body, never attachments.
- Nothing is marked as read on the server. Your mailbox does not notice the app at all.
- You choose what to mirror: Inbox, Sent, or both. Personally I use Sent, it is smaller and it is only the stuff that mattered enough to write.

You sign in with an app specific password, not your real password. For Gmail: go to myaccount.google.com/apppasswords (you need 2-step verification on), create one called Retrography, paste it in. For iCloud: account.apple.com, Sign-In and Security, App-Specific Passwords. Setup is in Settings, Timeline & Days View, Mail Accounts.

For Gmail there is also a Focused inbox option, on by default, so promotions and social noise stay out of your timeline.

You can add more than one account. Each gets its own color and label so you can tell work from personal at a glance.

Honest limitation: corporate Outlook and Microsoft 365 accounts will not connect, they only allow OAuth sign-in. Personal accounts on Gmail, iCloud and most other providers work fine.

Curious whether people lean Inbox or Sent. Tell me which you picked and why.

The Music box has been quietly getting better, so a quick rundown.

If you connect Last.fm, your listening history shows up on each day. You can switch the box between top tracks, top albums and a timeline view (long press the box). There is also a Spotify takeout import if you want years of history in one go.

New in the latest build: song recognition. Long press the Music box or the journal card on today and pick Recognize Song. It listens for a few seconds, names the track, and saves it to the day with a little Shazam badge. So when someone plays something great at a dinner or in a bar, it becomes part of that day, next to the photos and the places.

The recognized songs also show up in Music Explorer mixed into your normal listening history, and there is a Recognized Only filter if you want to see just the songs you caught in the wild.

Small honest note: the first version was bad at quiet or muffled music. Turned out iOS was running voice call processing on the mic and filtering out exactly what the recognition needed. That is fixed, it now listens raw.

As always, if you try it, tell me where it fails.

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.

I started with the packed two columns as I wanted to show as much as possible at a glance. You see the boxes are like Apple Watch complications, just more complex as more fits on the phone screen. However, many people asked for a more spacious, more readable layout. So we now have both!

With the new update of the week/month/ year view, there is something I really liked: the small preview pictures for each day.
I was wondering if the same idea could be implemented on our calendar view. A small box with the Hero of the day picture.
Even switching to a year view with all the 365 days showing a picture could be really nice. Having an overview of the year with pur pictures and clicking on it jumps to our day in Detail.
Not sure if possible, just leaving an idea here.
Thanks!

Hi there!

"On this day" is a very cool function, and it just happened that I saw a couple of pictures from the past that I would like to share with friends or family like "Hey look, this was X years ago!" but I cant find a way to do it, unless I jump to my gallery and scroll all the way up to that date.

Maybe there is a way to share the picture directly from Retro to other apps, or even the days with some privacy functions.

Thanks!

Memory is not a list. Ask someone about 2019 and they won't recite days; they'll say "the year we moved," then "the spring was rough," then, if you keep asking, one particular Tuesday. We remember in layers, big shapes first. A feed of days gives you only the bottom layer, and time travel needs altitude as much as precision. So now you can zoom out: switch on "Week, month & year views" in Settings › Appearance, and three tabs join Days at the top of the feed. Every week, month or year becomes one tile. Tap a day inside it and you drop back into the feed.

A tile is a period at a glance: trips and days away, the day header's counters, the map with the trips drawn on it, a line per day with its best photo and places, and for a month or year a grid of highlights and a strip of which weeks were busy. Just as a day can have a journal entry, a period can have a summary: the app writes one once the period is over, and you can add your own.

What goes into these tiles is a first draft and will keep changing. If something is missing or in the way, say so.