Simple Journal - Private Notes

Magille Ltd

In-app purchases

About this app

A private journal app with lock.

Need a place to write? Work on your thoughts and take notes. Great for writers. And for anyone who needs to get things off their mind.

Writing is powerful. Writing brings clarity. Simple Journal is built for this.

Write freely: Document your life, work on your thoughts, jot down notes, and store things worth remembering

For you to be able to write freely, even about sensitive topics, this app has been designed and built ground-up just for this purpose with privacy in mind: No ads. No forced cloud subscriptions. You are not the product, and your entries are and stay yours. Your entries are stored on your device by default.

Categorize your notes and journal entries into multiple journals or categories. Add images to your notes. Search through your existing notes, all of them at once, or only in the journal you have open.

Distraction-free editor

The editor has gotten a lot of special love to keep it as distraction-free and straightforward as possible. It is you, and what you want to write or think about. Nothing else.

Focus of the app has always been on giving you a place to write when you need one.

Editor has support for basic formatting and has quite a lot of customizability without taking away from the distraction-free experience many writers and ordinary people wanting to jot down notes short or long have come to appreciate over the years.

Keep your text safe

Continuous auto-save means you won't lose your work when you rotate your device or run out of battery.

Lock your journal to keep it secure

Simple Journal has extensive settings around locking and auth, as often the biggest threat to your privacy comes from people closest to you, and the random people you may have to hand over your device to. Ever been there? You know if you know.

You can tweak the settings and allow unlocking the app with any of the following: device credential (such as a pattern, pin or biometrics), custom Simple Journal specific password, or fingerprint which is the default.

Sync your journal and notes to YOUR Google Drive, with strong AES-256 encryption

With the upgrade you can sync your journals to your Google Drive and across your Android and Chromebook devices. This will make sure that you don't lose your journal and notes even if you lose or manage to destroy your phone. If you have multiple devices such as a phone and a tablet or a chromebook, or a secondary phone, you can keep your journal entries and attached images synced across all of them. A full copy of your private journal is kept on each device and (encrypted if you want) in your Drive. There's plenty of redundancy and you stay in control of your own data. This is the recommended way to keep your notes safely backed up, as we do not have them, and never will!

Backup and export manually

You can always move your data to a new device manually with the data import and export system, which can also be used for backups. This system is very robust and moves tens of thousands of journal entries and many gigabytes of images without a hitch!

Free features

✅ No ads
✅ Lock automatically (fingerprint, password, or device credential)
✅ Continuous auto-save
✅ Distraction-free editor
✅ Light and dark themes
✅ Multiple journals
✅ Inline images
✅ Search through entries
✅ Location tags (optional)
✅ Font customization
✅ Basic formatting (bold, italic, underline, highlight, strikethrough)
✅ Auto-indent
✅ Scrambled mode (write without unlocking)
✅ Keyboard shortcuts
✅ Export/import for manual backups

Pro features

✅ Encrypted sync to YOUR Google Drive 🔐
Backup your journal and sync across Android/Chromebook devices. End-to-end encrypted.
✅ Printable HTML exports 🖨️
✅ Export individual journals
✅ Encrypted manual exports (AES-256)
✅ Home screen shortcuts
✅ Pin important entries
✅ Custom color themes
✅ Font size control with volume keys
✅ Advanced sorting options
✅ Word and character counters

Ratings and reviews

Exactly what the name says. Absolutely just the basics, no ads, no hidden fees, just 3 payment options for "pro" but the app is perfectly usable without paying. The reasons I'm docking a star are transferring to another device is really annoying and confusing (could just be a skill issue) and the lack of more customization. It's pretty basic not bad but it gets a little boring after a while. Altogether, it's a near perfect journaling and simple note-taking app that does exactly what it needs to.

This journaling app is clean and helpful for logging thoughts that I may have, and I have used it for a while. The inability to screenshot journal entries, or send their data elsewhere besides within the app is a flawed design in my view. If the phone is lost, or if it must be reset, then all data goes with it. I understand that income is necessary, but at this rate, I would just make the app a paid one, or include ads without data tracking.

this app has been great for me. literally just a simple journal. but with the recent update, I'm not happy with the bright pink "back up your notes" ad at the bottom (and yes, it's an ad, because they are trying to get me to buy the feature). it was fine before when it was subtle and not in my face. I'm considering other options.

What’s new

This version fixes a few rarely occurring crashes