Joyful: Birthdays & Memories

Pettigrew Lab

In-app purchases

About this app

Joyful remembers your closest friends' birthdays, the little things you know about them, and the memories you've made together. All of it stays on your phone.

Your phone knows everyone's number and nothing about them. Joyful is the other thing: a place for what you actually know about the twenty people who matter. The books they love, the food they won't eat, the story they always tell, the gift idea you had in March and will have forgotten by December.

NEVER MISS THEIR BIRTHDAY
Joyful counts down to the day and nudges you ahead of it: on the day, the day before, or a week out. Enough time to actually do something. Pick someone from your contacts and Joyful can bring their birthday over too.

THE DATES NO CALENDAR KNOWS ABOUT
Birthdays are the easy ones. Joyful keeps the rest too: the day she walked out of the job that was eating her, the annual bad-map walk, seven years since the road trip.

OLD MEMORIES COME BACK
Write memories the way you'd tell them, with photos. On the day something happened, Joyful brings it back: ten years ago today, the first coffee. If one ever stings, press and hold it and ask Joyful to let it rest. It won't come back on its own again.

You can share a post from Facebook or Instagram straight into the journal and file it against the friendship it belongs to. There's a home-screen widget too, so a memory from this day, or a birthday coming up, is there without opening anything.

NOTICE WHEN IT HAS BEEN TOO LONG
Close friendships rarely end. They just go quiet and nobody notices. Give a friendship a rough rhythm and Joyful will tell you when nothing's been written down for a while. It reports a fact, "nothing since March", never a score. No streaks, nothing to keep up.

GIFT IDEAS, SAVED
Write an idea down the moment you have it. Joyful collects every idea across every friendship into one list, so December isn't a memory test.

TWENTY PEOPLE, ON PURPOSE
Joyful holds twenty friendships and no more. That's the point. It isn't a contact list or a CRM. It's for the handful of people you want to be deliberate about.

PRIVATE, PROPERLY
Everything you write stays on this phone, encrypted. No account, no server, no cloud sync, no analytics. There's nowhere for your journal to go and nobody to receive it, so we can't read it.

There's no extra passcode to remember either. Joyful opens when your phone does, so your phone's screen lock is what keeps it private.

NEW PHONE, SAME JOURNAL
Because nothing is stored anywhere else, you hold the only copy. Back it up to a file you keep, encrypted, and restore it on the next phone. Joyful also exports a calendar file, so your dates survive even if you stop using the app.

FREE FOR THREE FRIENDSHIPS
The first three are free, so you can find out whether this is something you'll keep up. One payment opens the other seventeen. No subscription, nothing to renew, and everything you've already written stays yours either way.

What’s new

First release.