How to choose a diary app
Before choosing where to write your own life, four questions are worth asking: who can read it, what leaves if you leave, does it work offline, and how long will it still be around.
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In this piece
A diary isn't just any app. It's the one place where you write things you wouldn't tell anywhere else, with people's names, dates and detail. It's worth choosing more carefully than you'd choose a grocery list app.
Who can read what you write
Ask specifically: does the text pass through anyone on the team, is it used to train some model, is it sold for advertising. An app with no ads at all doesn't have the most common reason to look at what people write.
What comes out if you want to leave
A diary that only exports to some odd format, or that takes days and needs an email request, is a diary that keeps you by the effort, not by the value. The right test: can you grab everything and delete the account right now, without waiting on anyone's reply?
Does it work offline
A diary gets written anywhere, on the subway, on a plane, in line. An app that needs a network just to open the writing screen will fail right when the urge to write shows up.
Whether it'll still exist in five years
A diary gets read later, sometimes many years later. A service that can shut down and take the history with it is a different kind of risk than a regular app. Exporting often, as a habit, is what makes that risk irrelevant: the file stays yours, whether the app keeps existing or not.
What matters less than it seems
A pretty icon, a dark theme, how many emoji: those change in one update. What doesn't change once it's written are the four questions above, and they're what decides whether a diary lasts years or becomes one more app deleted in March.