“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when we look back everything’s different?” — C.S. Lewis
Writing a diary or maintaining a journal of memories is a hobby shared by many, who prefer keeping an archive of their life events privately instead of posting them to Facebook. Similar to all tangible things, this hobby is also slowly transitioning its existence to a virtual one — from pen & papers to now smartphones & styluses.
For Android, there’s no dearth of diary / journal apps. Unfortunately, only a handful few of them are worth using and if you were looking for such apps, this list if for you.
1. Flava
Flava is the first app in our list and perhaps also the best one. It sets itself apart from the competition with its incredibly designed user interface and its large set of included functionalities — all for free.
Presenting memories in a timeline fashion, Flava is exactly how diary apps or other time machine apps should be designed. And with every memory, Flava lets you attach huge amount of data — photos, voice recordings and videos as well as songs, books, movies (all three fetched from Amazon), locations info and web addresses.
Furthermore, memories can also be tagged with weather conditions and your mood at that time along with a theme, using which, memories can be sorted later on.
Most importantly, Flava is cross platform. Apart from Android, it’s also available on iOS as well as a web interface. And not only this, it even lets you download your memories. What this essentially means is that you’ll always have your memory archive with you even if you decide to switch platforms (Blackberry and Windows Phone obviously do not count) or apps.
My personal favorite feature of Flava is definitely its Replay option that presents a slideshow of past events. My timeline is kinda empty right now, but it’ll obviously hopefully be very enjoyable in the future when I look back my memories. Sadly, it only supports photos for now and text-only memories do not find a place in it, which is a bit disappointing.
You get a storage of 305 MB for free when you sign up which can be increased on demand by paying a price.
Quirks
- Praises aside, there’s definitely some room for improvement in Flava. For instance, Flava has a separate search pane, but I’m yet to figure out how to get it working. Even after tagging memories with random tags, the search page doesn’t return anything — it always stays blank.
- Next, either Flava’s servers are incredibly slow or the app is. It took me multiple failed attempts to log into my account in the app.
And as a person who’s in love with the new ‘hamburger’ sidebar trend in apps like Play Music, Google+, Gmail, etc., I personally think that Flava’s sidebars would look a lot better if re-designed in that manner.
Flava has a PRO version as well, which provides the user with an additional storage of XX Gee-Bees for storing media — aimed specifically for long term users. What really increased my likeness for Flava is that, unlike various others apps, it does not poke you at regular intervals for upgrading to a pro customer. Users are initially provided with XXX MB storage and if you start enjoying using Flava, you’ll definitely want to upgrade for logging more life events with attached medias.
2. Friday
This one is an unique journal app for Android. Unlike Flava, Friday is an automatic journal that records your life events using your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google and Last.fm. Once setup, it’ll start capturing events happening around you without requiring you to input anything — like the people you talk to, the places you visit, the photos you capture, the songs you listen (on last.fm) , the emails and messages you receive or send and much more — automatically.
Friday helps you forget to remember. The app does the remembering for you.
It also includes an option for manually adding memories in a la-Twitter 140 characters, but that’s not really the point of Friday. The concept is super cool, but the UI seriously needs a visual overhaul — it’s just bland.
In case Flava and Friday do not satisfy your requirements or are too complicated for you, you might want to try out Private Diary – a very decent diary app with a very decent design and a very decent set of functionalities.
3. Private Diary
Private Diary is the simplest diary app among this list. It doesn’t boast a plethora of features, but at-least supports adding photos (pro feature), categories, tags and moods to memories as well as an option for online synchronization of memories with its website.
It would have been an excellent app if only the UI was not so bad — it still resembles Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Nevertheless, it isn’t even half bad as the slew of other badly designed and coded diary apps floating on the Play Store.
Simply put, if online interfaces, memory tags, weather conditions, moods, etc., seem too fancy to you, Private Diary might just be the diary app you were looking for — A simple, no frills one.
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With these mentioned three, the list of worth-using diary apps for Android ends here, although the quantity of such apps available in the Store is much more. Yes, just 2-3 apps was all I could find which didn’t look as if we were still living in the 1990s. But for most of the casual users, these three should be enough.
Drop in a comment if you’ve a better suggestion!
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