Chronicle
Chronicle is a personal journaling app for iPhone. You write an entry for the day and attach the things that belong with it — your own photos, workouts, places, and documents — and Chronicle saves all of it as ordinary files that stay yours.
Coming to the App Store
What Chronicle does
Chronicle is a diary you keep on your iPhone. Each day holds one or more entries, and each entry can contain:
- Text you write yourself.
- Photos you choose from Apple Photos or from your Google Photos library.
- Workouts from Apple Health, with their GPS routes if you want them.
- Places you search for and pin to the entry.
- Documents you pick from the iOS Files app — a scan, a receipt, a PDF.
Chronicle suggests material; it never decides for you. It will not attach a photo, a workout, or a document on its own, and it never deletes an original from Photos, Health, or any connected service.
How Chronicle uses Google Photos
Connecting Google Photos is entirely optional, and Chronicle works fully without it. It exists for one purpose: so that you can put pictures from your Google Photos library into your own journal entries.
When you connect it, you sign in on Google's own website — Chronicle never sees your
Google password — and Chronicle requests a single read-only permission,
photospicker.mediaitems.readonly. You then choose specific photos through
Google's own picker. Chronicle downloads only the photos you personally selected, saves
them into your journal on your device, and reads nothing else from your Google Account. It
does not browse your library, and it cannot see photos you did not pick.
Your sign-in token is stored in the iOS Keychain on your device. Chronicle has no server, so nothing from your Google Account is ever sent to us or to anyone else. Google Photos is the only account Chronicle connects to, and you can disconnect it at any time in Settings.
Chronicle's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Google user data is never used for advertising, never sold, never transferred to third parties, and never read by a human.
Your journal is a folder
Most journal apps keep your writing inside a database only they can open. Chronicle keeps a folder, organised by date, holding plain text, JSON, images, PDFs, and GeoJSON routes. You can open it on a computer, browse it in Files, copy it to a drive, or move it somewhere else entirely. Nothing about it needs Chronicle to make sense.
Delete and reinstall Chronicle, reconnect a destination folder, and your entire journal comes back.
No account, no server
There is no sign-up and no Chronicle server. Nothing you write is sent to us, because there is no us to send it to. Chronicle collects no analytics and no crash reports.
To keep the journal in sync or backed up, you point Chronicle at a folder you already own — in iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or anywhere else that appears in the iOS Files app. That provider syncs the folder, under your account and their terms. Chronicle never sits in the middle.
Built for the long run
- Offline first. The local copy is always complete. Edits don't wait for a network.
- Portable formats. Markdown, JSON, GeoJSON, PDF, and ordinary image files. Nothing proprietary.
- Redundant by design. One folder syncs; any number of others take full backups.
- Careful with locations. Precise GPS routes stay on your iPhone until you specifically say otherwise.
Privacy and terms
Chronicle's Privacy Policy explains exactly what stays on your device, what leaves it, and how Google user data is handled. The Terms of Use cover your use of the app.
Contact
Questions, bug reports, and privacy requests: iamsuperlative+chronicle@gmail.com.