Welle for iPhone
A journal for people who don’t journal.
Say how you are out loud, keep it, and find it again months later. Two minutes on your phone, and it all stays there.
iPhone, iOS 17 and later. Free while it is in beta.
Meet Welle
Most of us meet the world before we meet ourselves.
Within ninety seconds of waking, your phone has delivered a dozen other people’s priorities. Nobody has asked how you are.
Welle asks first. Hold the button and talk for thirty seconds, or type a line if that suits the moment better. That is a complete entry. The title is written for you afterwards, and nothing is ever filed into folders by hand.
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.
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.
Ask who you met in July and get your own words back. Search runs on the device, so it works on a plane and it keeps working.
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.
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.