Welle for iPhone
A journal for people who don’t journal.
A private journal to track your wellbeing. Check in, leave a voice note or brain dump in seconds, and find it all again months later. It stays on your phone.
iPhone, iOS 17 and later. Free while it is in beta.
02 · Speak
Thirty seconds, out loud. That is a whole entry.
Meet Welle
Not one more task on your list.
Most journaling apps are long, text-heavy and slow. They suit people who already write every day. Welle is for everyone else.
Hold the button and talk for thirty seconds, or type one line. That is a complete entry. Check in as often or as little as you like. Welle writes the title for you, and you never file anything by hand.
Over time you see what actually works for you. Then marketing, trends and other people’s data have less pull on your choices.
How was today
Five steps, and no words on any of them. A label makes you grade yourself against someone else’s word for it, and a face makes it a toy. You will never see a number, an average or a score.
03 · Measure
A ring can count your steps. It cannot ask how you are.
Why not a wearable
A wearable measures your body. Welle listens to you.
Most people track their wellness with a ring or a watch, a fitness app, or a notebook of workouts, meals and moods. Each one misses something.
Numbers, not the whole picture.
Steps, heart rate, calories and sleep scores are easy to measure. How you actually feel is not, so it goes unrecorded.
The score becomes the feeling.
In a 2014 study, people told they slept badly did worse on a thinking test, whatever their real sleep was (Draganich and Erdal, Journal of Experimental Psychology). A constant score can feed obsession and anxiety.
Your data lives on their servers.
Wearables and chat assistants keep your words and readings in the cloud, where they can be shared or legally demanded. Welle has no server, so there is no copy to hand over.
A wearable outsources your mind-body connection. Welle helps you build it.
How it works
Thirty seconds of talking, findable six months later.
Speak
Hold the button and talk.
Transcription runs as you speak, using the recogniser built into the phone. If a pause ends a sentence, the next one is added rather than replacing it.
Keep
It files itself.
Welle writes the title, reads the date and picks up the names you mention. There are no folders, no tags to maintain and no empty template waiting for you.
Find
Ask it months later.
Every entry adds to your own searchable record, so the more you share, the more useful it gets. Ask who you met in July and get your own words back. Search runs on the device, even on a plane.
04 · Keep
Every word you say, kept in order and found again.
What people use it for
One journal, many uses.
You decide what to track. Here are a few ways people use it.
A change of medication.
After thyroid surgery, one woman had to switch her medication while she travelled. She checked in through the day and compared how the new one worked against the old one. Notes like these are easy to share with your doctor.
A fitness journey.
Weight, meals and workouts tell part of the story. Welle keeps the rest: energy, recovery, motivation, and when cravings or fullness come.
Names at an event.
Met ten people at a conference? Say their names and roles as you go, and search for them weeks later.
Travel.
Leave a voice note about where you are, what you did and who recommended what. It takes a moment, not the whole afternoon.
A memory that slips.
More adults now report trouble with memory, focus and decisions: 7.4% in the US in 2023, up from 5.3% in 2013 (Neurology, 2025). A record you can search takes some of that weight.
05 · See
A month, drawn by how it felt.
Inside the app
The whole app is six screens.
These are the current build, photographed off the phone.
What it will never do
Three things it will never do.
No streaks.
Miss a week and it says “Welcome back”, and nothing else. There is no chain to break.
No scores.
You will never see an average mood or a number out of ten. The scale sizes an arc and sorts a list. It is never shown as a figure.
No diagnosis.
It will say “time outdoors appears on 83% of your higher-rated days”. It will never say “exercise makes you happy”.
Every sentence the app shows you about your own life is checked before it is drawn. Causal claims, clinical words and scores out of ten do not pass that check.
06 · Seal
It stays on your phone. There is no copy anywhere else.
Privacy is the product
There is no server to leak.
There is no account, because there is nothing to sign in to. Speech recognition, search, name detection and pattern finding all run on your phone. On Android the release build ships without permission to use the internet at all, so the operating system enforces it rather than a policy promising it.
Welle refuses to fall back to a network recogniser. If your device or your language cannot transcribe on-device, it offers you typing instead of quietly sending your voice somewhere.
Early access
Join the Welle beta.
Welle is on TestFlight for iPhone while it is finished in the open. Leave your email and we will send you an invitation. You will get one email about one app.
Built with your feedback
Tell us what is wrong with it.
Welle is in beta and it is still moving. Bugs found by people using it are the reason most of it works. Every note is read by a person, and you do not need an account to send one.