Where has the time gone? If you haven't kept a journal, you might not know. Journaling might be the most underrated activity that could boost your productivity and well-being in just a few minutes a day. Just jot your thoughts down or record what happened during the day for a simple way to manage stress, enhance creativity, increase happiness, improve health, and increase work performance, according to the latest research. Ben Franklin swore by his copious journal notes, as have many other successful people in history, including Abraham Lincoln, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Maya Angelou.
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'If you’re serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured, and unique individual, keep a journal.'- Jim Rohn, business philosopher and author
The mere act of daily writing is a keystone habit that can improve every other area of your life, because it increases your self awareness. Journaling helps you record all the minutiae that, gathered together, reveal the meaning in your life and help you take the next best step.
The trouble is, keeping a journal isn't easy. It takes dedication to this new habit and a willingness to open up when writing on a blank page. What have you done today? Who are you really? Journaling apps can help you figure this out and help you establish a daily writing routine.
After testing nearly two dozen journaling apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web, these are the top journaling apps we'd recommend to record your memories this year and in years to come.
What Makes a Great Journaling App
A paper notebook and pen are fine for journaling, but apps offer more. They give you more context on what you've accomplished and where you might want to go, and let you include photos from your phone or posts from your social media feeds to make the journaling experience more rewarding. Add in reminders and the ability to search your journal entries, and digital journaling is almost a no-brainer.
The best apps to keep a journal have a few things in common:
- Easy entry: If it takes more than a couple of clicks or taps to add a journal entry, chances are you're not going to do it.
- Pleasant interface: A minimalist, uncluttered interface helps you focus on your thoughts and make journaling a pleasant experience.
- Reminders: Perhaps the biggest challenge to journaling is remembering to do it. Automatic reminders help you keep up the habit.
- Exporting: Just in case the app stops being developed or you want to move to a different journaling platform, you'll want to be able to export your entries in a format other programs can read, such as PDF or RTF.
- Syncing: Syncing will make sure your journal's up to date no matter what device you're using.
Other features that might be important to you include password protection, Markdown support, ability to add more than one photo, automatically adding location and weather, and journaling prompts.
The Best Journaling Apps
To come up with this list, we looked at popular journal apps available in the app stores and other sites' journal apps roundups. We eliminated some apps from our list to test because of high price (one Windows journal app is priced at $99.99 versus our pick for best Windows Journal, Diarium, which is $19.99), lack of features that meet our criteria, or poor user reviews (for example, multiple reports of syncing issues).
We tested the remaining apps over two weeks—creating journal entries daily (or almost daily). In the end, these are the best journaling apps we've found for every platform.
- Day One (Mac, iOS, Android)—best for writing quick journal entries in a simple, intuitive interface
- Diarium (Windows, Android)—best for dictating journal entries and seamless integration with Windows
- Glimpses (Windows)—best for free journaling on Windows; free
- Journey (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Web)—best for seamless journaling and syncing on any platform
- Penzu (Web, iOS, Android)—best for journaling in a blog-like environment while keeping your entries secure
- Dabble.me (Email)—best for journaling by email
- Momento (iOS)—best for automated journaling from your social media feeds
- Grid Diary (iOS)—best for templated journaling
- Five Minute Journal (iOS, Android)—best for quick morning and evening reflections
The Best Journaling App for Mac and iOS
Day One (Mac, iOS, Android)
Best for writing quick journal entries in a simple, intuitive interface
Day One lets you add multiple photos and even videos to your journals
Since its release in March 2011, Day One has long been the most highly recommended journaling app. The Sweet Setup selected it as 'the best journaling app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac', it's been Apple's Editors Choice in the App Store numerous times, and Lifehacker chose it as the best journaling app for iPhone.
It's not hard to see why. The app offers a wide array of features—just about everything you might want or need in a digital journal. You can create journal entries in just one click on the Mac from the menu bar, use templates to make journaling easier, automatically add metadata (location, weather, motion activity, currently playing music, and step count), tag entries with hashtags, insert photos and videos, password-protect your journal, and format entries in Markdown. With Day One's latest update, you can even draw in the app using the Apple Pencil on iPad or your finger on iPhone. And all of this is within a elegant, unobtrusive design—just one main blue color plus menus and icons in gray, no gaudy toolbars in sight.
Perhaps Day One's best feature is the ability to customize multiple reminders. Most other journal apps only send you one reminder during the day, but with Day One, you can get prompted to write at, say, when you start the day, at lunchtime, and then at the end of your workday to keep track throughout the day.
The free app offers pretty much all of the core journaling features, but for syncing, multiple photos, and multiple journals, you'll need to subscribe to the Day One Premium service.
Day One Pricing: Free; $34.99/year for premium features, which includes the Mac app (normally $49.99 on its own)
The Best Journaling Apps for Windows and Android
Diarium (Windows, Android)
Best for dictating journal entries and seamless integration with Windows
Diarium is the highest-rated journaling app in the Windows 10 App Store. Compared to other journaling apps on any platform, Diarium stands out for its support for multiple media types in journal entries. If you'd rather speak than type, you can dictate your thoughts—and the speech recognition is actually accurate, in our tests. You can attach an audio file, an inked drawing, or any other type of file to your entries, as well as multiple photos. Heck, you can even rate your journal entries (perhaps most useful as a way to track how happy you are each day).
Diarium syncs to other Windows devices or Android via OneDrive and you can export your entries to DOCX, HTML, RTF, or TXT formats—with separate files for media attachments—so you can rest assured that your data will always be accessible. We found the syncing between Windows and Android instant and reliable.
To make journaling even easier, Diarium can automatically pull in feeds from Twitter, Facebook, or Swarm and will remind you once a day (at your chosen time) to write in the journal.
Diarium Pricing: Free on Android; $19.99 on Windows 10; $2.99 for Android premium features, such as syncing and exporting to Word or HTML
Glimpses (Windows)
Best for free journaling on Windows
Windows users have fewer journaling apps choices than Mac, iOS, and Android users, but that's not a big deal because the free Glimpses app has you covered with most of the journaling features you'd want—and then some. You can write in Markdown, export to PDF, drag and drop images into your entries, password protect your journal, tag entries, view entries from a timeline or calendar view, and sync across Windows devices via Dropbox.
Glimpses offers a few unique features we didn't see in other journaling apps. One is the retro mode: Turn it on, and you can write a journal entry in a typewriter font along with clickety-clack sounds as you type. There's a dark mode as well, which is great for journaling at night, and a distraction-free writing mode that focuses on just your words. You can also create a shareable link to a journal entry, so your family, friends, and fans can catch up on what you've been up to outside of Facebook.
One thing to note is that when you add an image to a journal entry in Glimpses, it adds it as a photo behind the journal heading, much like if this were a blog post. That's different than the inline photos in most journaling apps. Also, Glimpses doesn't have built-in reminders, but for a completely free, modern journaling app that works with Windows 7 and above, we're not complaining. iOS and Android versions are in the works.
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Glimpses Pricing: Free
The Best Cross-Platform Journaling App
Journey (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Web)
Best for seamless journaling and syncing on any platform
Journey is the one journaling app we found that works across pretty much any device. And it does it well, with features that rival those of our other top journaling app picks—support for multiple images, as well as audio or video, syncing to Google Drive, exporting to multiple formats, auto location and weather, password protection, and even importing Day One entries.
Journey is probably the best alternative to Day One, with a similar streamlined interface, as well as a dark mode. If you'd rather not pay a monthly subscription for the premium version of Day One, you could buy a one-time license for Journey instead. You'll need to upgrade for features like unlimited journal entries via email, daily email reminders, and automated entries via Zapier.
Journey Pricing: Free on Web, Android, and iOS; $16.99 on Mac, $17.99 on Windows; from $4.99 for premium mobile features
The Best Online Journaling Apps
Penzu (Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone)
Best for journaling in a blog-like environment while keeping your entries secure
Writing a journal entry in Penzu is much like writing a blog post in WordPress or Blogger: You have a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word-processor-like interface, complete with a text formatting toolbar. So why not just use Word, WordPress, or a note-taking app like Evernote? For one thing, Penzu keeps your entries together in one journal online, as opposed to several different files. Custom email reminders help you remember to record your journal entry. And Penzu can uniquely send you reminders of what you've written in the past, so you can reminisce about the good old days.
If you're on the Pro plan, Penzu can also safeguard your entries with military strength encryption, send multiple reminders, and customize each journal with distinct covers, backgrounds, and fonts.
If you want to keep a journal the same way you might a personal blog, but keep it private, Penzu is an excellent option. You'll need to spring for the paid plan, though, to get core digital journaling features such as tagging.
Penzu Pricing: Free; from $19.99/year Premium version for multiple journals, tags, encryption, search, and journal customization with design themes
Dabble.me (Email)
Best for journaling by email
Dabble.me is the journal that comes to you—in your inbox. Once a day, at a time of your choosing, Dabble.me will send you an email asking 'How was your day?' Reply with your answer in as few or as many sentences as you want, and the app will record your journal entry in a private web page, much like a personal blog. You can add a photo, tag entries with hashtags, add links to songs in Spotify to play them on your Dabble.me site, and view previous entries on a calendar or in a shuffled random selection.
If you live in your inbox and need that nudge to keep a journal, emailing your memories might be the best option. However, you'll need a Dabble.me Pro plan to unlock the app's best features. With the free plan, email prompts are only sent every other Sunday; the Pro plan lets you change the frequency and days that emails are sent (once a day), attach one photo to the entry, edit previous entries, and search past entries. Compared to similar services, however, such as My Evening Post, Dabble.me is more flexible and costs less.
Dabble.me Pricing: Free; $3/month for features like daily reminders, photo insertion, and editing
The Best Low-Effort Journaling Apps
Momento (iOS)
Best for automated journaling from your social media feeds
If you're already documenting your life online on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Medium, you're already keeping a journal, so to speak. It's just spread across the internet. Momento brings all of your shared posts and interactions from sites like these into one place, helping you keep a digital archive of your online interactions. You can also create new journal entries in Momento aside from the social networks, like you would with a typical journaling app.
Momento excels at resurfacing where you've been and what you've done in the past. You can group separate entries (or 'moments') into 'events'—so all of the Instagram photos you were tagged in for a family reunion could live together. The app will show you what happened on a specific date in previous years, so you can see how time has flown. And preset reminders—for example, 'what did you dream?' at 7:30 am and 'how was your day?' at 8 pm—make it easier to journal when you're not sure what to write.
Momento Pricing: Free for up to 3 social feeds; $3.99 for premium features such as multiple photos, more social feeds, themes, and app locking
Grid Diary (iOS)
Best for templated journaling
Grid Diary bills itself as 'the simplest way to get started with keeping a diary' and MacWorld praises the app for being as easy to keep a journal as filling out a form. Every day, Grid Diary presents you with 8 question prompts, such as 'How much money did I spend today?', 'What am I grateful for?', and 'What did I get done today?', laid out on a one-page grid, so you get both a detailed and bird's eye view of what's happening in your life, one day at a time.
There are numerous grid templates you can choose from or customize the grid and questions yourself to focus on the areas of life you want to track. Instead of wondering what you should write about each day, use Grid Diary to write down simple responses that help you reflect on your days.
Grid Diary Pricing: Free; $4.99 for pro features including passcode lock, syncing to iCloud or Dropbox, multiple reminders, customizable fonts and text formatting, exporting to Evernote or Dropbox, and night mode
Five Minute Journal (iOS, Android)
Visual lighting software training. Best for quick morning and evening reflections
Don't think you have any time in the day to journal? How about just five minutes a day? Five Minute Journal makes journaling nearly effortless, with timed prompts in the morning and evening that only require you to list a few things, such as what you'll do to make the day great and three amazing things that happened today. That's it. That's as simple as journaling gets.
Based on positive psychology research, Five Minute Journal helps support a gratitude habit and self-reflection. You can add a photo for each entry and export to PDF, but other than that, this lean app is as simple as it gets.
Five Minute Journal Pricing: $4.99
Automate Your Journal with Zapier
Maybe you don't want to set up or sign up for yet another app. No worries! With app automation tool Zapier, you can connect your favorite apps and create your own digital archive of your life, automatically.
For example, you can send your photos and thoughts to a new 'Journal' or 'Diary' notebook in Evernote or OneNote whenever you post to sites like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, or add an event to the notebook when it happens in Google Calendar to keep track of where you've been and what you've been doing.
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The templates below will help you get started.
Create Notes in Evernote or OneNote for New Google Calendar Events
Save Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook Posts
Quickly Append a Note in Evernote or OneNote
If you're using a single note as a log to track your work projects, health, travel history, and more, getting updated info as quickly as possible into that note is paramount. With Zapier's Push Chrome extension, you can easily append an existing note in Evernote or OneNote with your new information without having to switch windows. Check out this tutorial on updating a note in Evernote or OneNote from your browser.
As simple as it seems, journaling is a rewarding activity that can reap many benefits. The hardest part is actually sitting down and writing, but the apps above—with their reminders, prompts, and simple interfaces—can help make this the year you actually keep up a journal.
Want to upgrade your calendar too? Here are the 10 best calendar apps to manage your busy schedule.
This post was originally published in January 2018 and updated in January 2019 for pricing and other details.
Rooting our smartphone is the first thing that came to our mind when we plan to implement some best Android tweaks and hacks.
Rooting Android smartphone gives us extra administrative privileges to tweak Android smartphone. Mostly we root Android phone to install Android hacking tools, install custom ROMs, to delete factory installed apps, etc. But also we forget rooting Android smartphone may compromise our device — it will open door to malware, hackers and also void phone warranty.
What if I say, you can customize Android smartphone without rooting?
Yes with some awesome tools, that doesn’t require root permission, can easily tweak your Android smartphone by controlling some settings, customize the interface and lots more.
So if you like to root your phone just to customize some options in your smartphone instead of installing hacking tools, I strongly recommend trying below-listed apps before you root.
Best Android Tweaks Without Rooting Your Smartphone:
1. Tweak Status Bar Looks:
How about changing the looks of the status bar on your Android smartphone.
The tool named, Status will do this trick.
Status is a status bar replacement that draws an overlay on top of the system-generated status bar. This means that the actual status bar is only hidden under the replacement; touch gestures are not overridden, and the standard notification panel is still shown.
Status supports Android version 4.1 and higher and also the app is ad-free and with no “pay to unlock this feature” popups.
Developer: James Fenn
Price: Free
2. Save Battery Life:
One of the most searched Android tweaks — how to save battery life on Android?
There are many tips and tricks that will limit the draining of your Android smartphone battery. And also there are some tools out there that claim to save your battery but most of that apps require root permission.
But don’t worry if you don’t like to root your phone and still needs to save battery life using this app — Pixoff: Battery Saver AMOLED.
Pixoff saves battery by applying a filter that turns off pixels of AMOLED screens, also incorporates the possibility of making a filter night decreasing so damaging blue light and you can further reduce battery consumption with the facility to put a wallpaper to true black. Requires Android 4.4 and up.
Developer: UrySoft
Price: Free+
3. Replace your stock notification panel:
Are you kinda bored with your stock notification panel, looking for something different — then try Material Notification Shade to customize the notification panel.
Material Notification Shade brings the features from Android Oreo to your notification center. With a ton of customization on top, this app helps you to look at your device unique
Developer: Treydev Inc
Price: Free+
4. Dual Apps Environment:
Another one of the Android tweaks — running multiple instances of an app.
Parallel Space-Multi Accounts, helps you to run multi accounts of the same app simultaneously. Means you can run multiple WhatsApp, Facebook accounts or any other app or game in one phone. Check our detailed tutorial about Parallel Space.
Parallel Space is based on MultiDroid, the first application virtualization engine on Android. App features include custom themes to cloned apps, protects user privacy by making apps invisible on device with the Incognito Installation feature, supported 24 languages.
Developer: LBE Tech
Price: Free+
5. Control Anything In Your Phone:
MacroDroid— A powerful app used to control basically anything in your Android smartphone. This is one of the best and easy to automation app in Android.
Some of the best examples what this app can do — Turn on the Wifi connection when you launch a particular app (and off again when closed), Auto respond to a specific incoming SMS by sending your current location, Toggle the power button to tell you the time (without taking out of your pocket) and Use NFC tags to configure the device (turn on Bluetooth, set volume etc).
MacroDroid includes many built-in and user shared templates to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the application and help you get started.
The free version of MacroDroid is limited to five macros and displays adverts. You can upgrade in the application to allow unlimited macros and remove all adverts.
Developer: ArloSoft
Price: Free+
6. Run Every App In Full-Screen Mode:
This one is another best Android tweak you can do without rooting. Immersive Mode Managertool lets you force your apps or games to display in full-screen mode. You can either define a global “Immersive Mode” which will be applied system-wide. Or if you wanna go further you can define the “Immersive Mode” per-app.
Developer: Manuel Wrage
Price: $1.99
7. Smart Indicators For Anything:
PowerLine — Perfect app to make your phone looks different. PowerLine is a really powerful app that lets you have a highly customizable bar at the top of your screen to display how much battery is left, how much time you use your smartphone etc.
Not only the top you also can show indicator bars on any side of the screen and also can display any number of indicators at the same time on screen.
Developer: Urbandroid (Petr Nálevka)
Price: Free
8. Record Screen In Android Without Root:
Majority of screen recorder apps in Android requires root permission, but AZ Screen Recorder doesn’t.
AZ Screen Recorder is the best app to record the screen of your Lollipop. It does NOT require root access, no time limit, no watermark, ad-free and very easy to use with one action to start and stop recording.
AZ screen recorder lets you record your screen to HD and FullHD videos and it is the only screencast app in the Android market that can be paused and resumed while recording.
Developer: AZ Screen Recorder
Price: Free+
9. Change Looks Of Your Boring Navigation Bar:
Tired of your boring Navigation Bar? Make it awesome!
Then use Navbar Apps — an app that lets you change the looks of Navigation Bar in Android smartphone. Turn it blue, make it red – anything you want. Select cool image as background or match color automatically to fit it to running app. Whatever you choose, it will be awesome! And then add some data, like battery level.
Developer: Damian Piwowarski
Price: Free+
10. Display Stylish Music Visualizer Beneath Your Phone’s Navigation Bar:
Bring your Music Experience to life with Floating Visualization beneath your on-screen Navigation Bar.
MUVIZ is a first of its kind app that displays a Music Visualizer beneath your Navbar while you are listening to your favorite music from your favorite apps. MUVIZ not only enhances your music experience, but it also elevates your video experience by showing visualizations over your favorite video apps like Youtube, MX Player, etc.,
Developer: Sparkine Labs
Price: Free+
11. Edge Lighting And Rounded Corners:
Like to tweak your Android smartphone with edge lighting notification and rounded corners just like Samsung Galaxy S8, S9, then Edge Mask is the app you need to install.
Edge Mask comes with an easy UI, that let you add rounded corners to any Android smartphone. What makes this app more interesting is the addition of edge lighting notification like Galaxy S8, S9 — which glows edges of your screen whenever you get a new notification.
Developer: uno.kim
Price: Free
12. Automatically Generates New Wallpaper Every Time:
Tired of that old-looking those usual wallpapers on your phone screen, then this automatic wallpaper generator app is for you. Tapet— first of its kind and one of the best wallpaper apps for Android.
Unlike any other wallpaper apps, Tapet generates a new background image for your smartphone every time. When comes to images — each time Tapet uses different patterns and colors to generate a new background with the highest possible quality and also no images are being downloaded from the internet. Everything is rapidly generated in your device. And you will most likely never see the same wallpaper twice.
Developer: SharpRegion
Price: Free+
13. Beautiful Keyboard For Android:
Claims to be the “next generation of typing”, Cheetah Keyboard is arguably one of the most beautiful and extremely customizable keyboards for Android.
Cheetah Keyboard comes with a whole bunch of themes and features to tweak every aspect of the keyboard and gives awesome effects every time you press fingers on the keys. If anyone does like customization, there is so much do with this keyboard app. Also, another cool unique feature of Cheetah Keyboard is that you can DIY your own keyboard theme from scratch.
Developer: Cheetah Keyboard
Price: Free+
14. Live Wallpaper App Which Uses Less Battery:
Like to put live wallpapers, but not want to drain your precious battery, then HexShaders is the app you need to tweak your Android smartphone.
HexShaders — a powerful live wallpaper app for Android which uses less battery. It is not only absolutely stunning whether you are on your lock screen or home screen but it is cleverly designed. It freezes every time you open up applications, so it’s not always running in the background and the live wallpapers available on HexShaders are in low resolution but made to look higher quality by shaping the pixels in hexagons instead of squares, thus keeping its artistic look and saving the battery life of your Android phone.
Developer: Sergey Konyukhov
Price: Free
15. Organize Your Apps In Drawers:
Drawers app is just like a floating launcher, it creates collapsable which overlay across any one of your applications so that you can launch any app anytime.
Drawers come with a lot of options, you can have up to six different drawers of different colors holding different applications up to five in each drawer. The app is on its initial version, so more features and bug fixes are coming.
Developer: dave k
Price: Free
16. Make Your Android Smartphone Read-out-loud Notifications to you:
How cool it will be if you can check your notifications without touching your phone. Audify Notifications Reader enables one of the coolest notification hacks for you by making your Android smartphone read-out-loud notifications to you. By activating notification reading feature, you can achieve a hands-free smartphone experience and hear notifications either via wired or Bluetooth headset and phone speaker.
Developer: AppKiddo
Price: Free+
That’s it guys these are some of the best Android tweaks and hacks you can do without rooting your phone.
So use these tools if you like to customize your Android phone’s looks and its functions. And also let us know other similar apps that can do wonders without rooting.