Most journaling apps store your entries on a server. Most AI journaling apps send your private thoughts to OpenAI or their own cloud. MirrorNotes does neither. The AI runs on your iPhone. Your journal text goes nowhere.
Privacy policies say "we don't sell your data." That's different from "we don't see your data." Most journaling apps store your entries on their servers, even if they promise not to misuse them. When AI features are involved, your text is processed by a cloud model, which means it travels across the internet and through someone else's infrastructure.
This isn't a criticism of those companies' intentions. It's a technical consequence of how cloud AI works. The model has to receive your text to process it.
Gemma 3 1B runs via CoreML on your iPhone's Neural Engine. No API calls, no tokens consumed, no data sent.
Entries stored locally in SwiftData on your device. Encrypted at rest by iOS. We have no database of your entries.
Optional iCloud backup syncs entries across your Apple devices. Encrypted under your Apple ID. We can't access it.
Every feature, writing, reading, search, all AI, works with no internet connection.
| App | Journal stored on-device | AI on-device | Account required | Works offline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MirrorNotes | Yes | Yes, Gemma 3 | No | Fully |
| Day One | iCloud + their servers | Cloud AI | Required | Writing only |
| Rosebud | Their servers | Cloud AI | Required | No |
| Reflect | Their servers | Cloud AI | Required | Writing only |
| Apple Journal | On-device | Apple Intelligence (cloud) | Apple ID | Writing only |
Privacy doesn't mean fewer features. MirrorNotes delivers the full AI journaling experience, privately, and free:
No. Entries are stored on your device in SwiftData (an Apple framework) and optionally synced through your own iCloud. We have no server that receives journal text, no database of entries, and no ability to read what you write.
Entries stored locally are deleted with the app. iCloud copies are retained until you delete them from iCloud, that's under your control in iOS Settings. We hold nothing on our end.
Yes, read the full privacy policy. The short version: we don't collect journal content, we don't sell data, and there's no analytics on what you write.
Open source is on the roadmap. The on-device architecture means even without open source, the privacy is verifiable: run a network monitor while using MirrorNotes and you'll see zero journal-related network requests.
Every feature, completely free. No trial, no card, no catch.
Download on the App Store