There was talk of journalling in the Hemispheric View’s Discord and it got me curious about Apple Journals. When that first came out it was iPhone only, and I was unable to try it out. But they’ve since included it on iPadOS with the iOS 26 release. So I booted it up and to a quick look.
If I had to choose one must-have for a Journalling app, its exports. A journalling app must support exporting your posts to an open format, preferably one that is readable within a text editor. Apps come and go, but if what you’re writing is to last decades, you’d want a format that’ll outlive them all.
This was a sticking point with Apple’s release of Journals, but it looks like they’ve addressed that. You can export your journal as HTML documents, even on iPad. I’d prefer Markdown myself but HTML is still an open standard that is readable in any text editor so it’s a decent choice. Granted, I only exported one journal with one post and zero images, so I can’t tell you the limits of these exports, but it looks promising.
So would I use it if I wasn’t journalling already? I’d probably say I would, if I had an iPhone. Exporting is still something you need to remember to do manually, so I probably would’ve moved to something like Obisidan eventually: they work on an open format natively. But I wouldn’t have dismissed Apple’s Journalling app.