Journal apps like Day One and Journey are great, but they only work if you are willing to. What if you’re not? What if you just want a passively curated timeline of your life to scroll through, just like Facebook? There’s Heyday for you.
Heyday is an automated journal app. Once you grant access to your Photos and Location Services, the app will scan your photo library (thankfully ignoring the screenshots), match them up with the tied up location data, build small album-esque collages (like Moments in the Photos app) and present it all in a scrolling feed. Heyday is a completely free app. There are no in app purchases to speak of and the company seems to be offering unlimited cloud storage for your photos and journal. So naturally I went to their Privacy Policy page. And to their credit, I didn’t find anything fishy. There are the general warnings about anonymizing and encrypting data, law enforcement notices etc. But nothing out of the ordinary.
While cloud sync is heavily featured, it’s not necessary and it doesn’t limit other features of the app. So if you’re paranoid of handing over your personal details to a company whose business model makes no sense to you, just don’t use the cloud sync. Talking about the actual app, it sits somewhere in between social networks and fully blown journaling apps. Think of it as your own little social network if you will.
Other than the automated stream of photos that are filtered and arranged in collages based on location, the app also has a manual journal feature. You can make journal entries with text, photos, location and tag Facebook friends (without them knowing) on your own. If your journaling needs don’t require complicated workflows and Markdown support, Heyday might make a good journaling app in itself. Heyday also borrows the look-back feature from the likes of the Everpix and Picturelife. The app will notify you with the journal entry or photos that you took the same day, a year ago. If all your photos are stored on your iPhone (or you decided to use the app’s cloud sync) and not on Dropbox, this might work for you. If you leave Background App Refresh and Location Services turned on, the app will keep churning posts in the background as you travel to new places and take new photos. But if your iPhone’s battery already runs out by the end of the day, I’d suggest otherwise.
So how does Heyday fit in your life if you already use Dropbox for photo sync and Day one or any other app for journaling? I see Heyday as a great self-indulgence app and being better at sorting/searching through photos than the default photos app, Dropbox or even Carousel. Get the app, don’t turn on cloud sync, maybe disable background access and once in a while pop in to take a trip down the memory lane, with the help of daily look-backs. Heyday is available for Free on the App Store.