Diary with Lock: Journal

A diary with a lock that is actually locked.

Most diary apps with a lock check a PIN on the way in and then store everything you have written as ordinary text. Anything that can read the phone's files can read the diary - and so can anyone who gets past the PIN screen by any route the app did not think of.

This one encrypts your entries with your passphrase. Not hidden behind a screen: encrypted, with AES-256, using a key that exists only while you are using the app and is derived from the passphrase you typed. Without it there is nothing to read.


★ THE LOCK COVERS THE ENTRY, NOT JUST THE DOOR
• Your words, titles, moods and tags are stored as ciphertext, and the key is never written to the phone
• The database can see one thing about an entry: which day it is for. That is what draws the calendar without opening anything
• Photos go inside the lock too - the picture is copied into the app and encrypted, so it stops being visible in your gallery
• Set it to hide the diary from the app-switcher preview and from screenshots


★ NO BACK DOOR, AND WE SAY SO BEFORE YOU START
• There is no recovery question, no email reset and no master key. If you forget the passphrase the entries are gone
• You have to tick a box acknowledging that before the diary is created, because a recovery route is a second key to the same door and it would make all of the above decorative
• Wrong guesses slow down, so somebody holding your phone for two minutes gets nowhere


★ AN APP THAT IS ACTUALLY FOR WRITING
• A page for the entry, set in a serif face at a readable size, and nothing else on the screen
• One open writing prompt a day, if you want one - every prompt appears before any repeats
• Mood in five words, not ten faces, and no red-to-green scale: a hard day is not an error
• Tags, and a search that reads titles, entries and tags, accents and capitals ignored
• A month calendar with a dot on every day you have written on
• Your draft is saved as you type, encrypted, so nothing is lost if the phone reclaims memory


★ IT IS YOURS, AND IT STAYS ON THIS PHONE
• No account, no sign-up, no cloud, nothing uploaded, and nothing to breach
• Excluded from Android cloud backup on purpose - not even Google gets a copy
• This app asks for three permissions and all three are for ads: internet, network state, advertising ID. Google's ads library merges in five more of its own, none of which Android stops to ask you about. There is no storage permission, no photo-library access, no notifications, and nothing of ours running in the background
• Export to a plain text file whenever you want a copy you can read in ten years. The app tells you plainly that an export is NOT encrypted, before it writes and again inside the file


★ ADS
No banner ads anywhere. There is a full-screen ad occasionally, and only after you finish writing an entry - never while you are typing, never on the unlock screen, and never after you delete something. An optional video turns ads off for a day.


Because the passphrase is the key, uninstalling the app or clearing its data deletes the diary, and there is no copy anywhere to restore from. That is the same fact as the first paragraph, stated the other way round.