Muninn is a diary app with a few small twists. It keeps your private life private, remembers even the days you did not write, and connects to anything you consider worth remembering through Automations and Shortcuts.
Most diaries start with a blank page. Muninn tells you about years you’ve already lived. Open it, and it shows you an “On this Day” for every year before: the photos you took, the weather, the trains you rode, where you checked in, what you had planned and what you wrote. If you give it permission, that is.
Then you add the part only you have: what it was actually like.
People aren’t things, and that’s why Muninn has @ for people and # for things. That way your friend @Asia isn’t a continent and #Paris isn’t a heiress to a hotel empire. Combined with Search, that’s a powerful feature to remember things and people.
Most journals, paper or app, do one thing well: writing your thoughts and your days. Muninn tries to do something else as well: remembering the then. Research shows, that journaling is extremely beneficial to both mental and (suprisingly) physical health, but many studies warn, that while journaling itself (“Mind Dump”) is great, it’s best combined with retrospectives.
Muninn’s “on this day” shows you the years that were, even the ones you did not journal, allowing you to take a look back and experiencing how far you have come. A perfect way to structure your brain around things you did, and how you got there.
Nothing is worse than apps locking your data on their servers and/or behind subscription payments. Muninn may cost a nominal amount on release but will never have a subscription model or “premium” addons. One time, price of a cup of coffee, updates for life. Because, well, that’s what we’re talking about here: your life. And no one should have the right to lock that away. Read the privacy policy →
Write in plain Markdown, saved as plain files any text editor can open. Coming from Day One or Apple Journal? Import the whole thing: entries join their days, and a day you’ve already written is offered for merging, never replaced.
One colour per year: every place you’ve been on today’s date, all at once. Tap a pin to open its day.
And the places your iPhone noticed today can become check-ins, after you’ve looked at them. Nothing lands on a day until you say so.
Your photo library and Calendar, read on the phone. Swarm check-ins and Träwelling train journeys, under your own keys, fetched by your iPhone or iPad; Muninn for Mac shows them and doesn’t import them itself. Shortcuts can read from and write to Muninn, extending its usefulness. Log your caffeine intake or write your steps into Muninn, even edit entries from Drafts.
A trip, a job, that time you lived in Japan. Name a span of days, or accept one Muninn suggests, and it gathers everything from those days into one river. Muninn uses an on-device call to Apple’s AI to suggest names, everything stays on your devices.
Declare as many “Custom Fields” as you’d like and set them in Muninn or use Shortcuts and Automations to set them. Log how many gummy bears you ate, what your Blood Glucose was (using a simple Automation), how many steps you walked, when you weighed yourself, and more.
I’m a daytime cook and evening coder, essentially the inverse of my coder friends, who cook to relax. Muninn is built to be private within the same strict privacy laws that govern everything in Norway and the EU. Because that’s the app I want, so it’s the app I made.
I realized, very early on, that looking back made me more excited for the future. As an apprentice, reading back into my apprenticeship logs (which we had to keep), showed me how far I'd come. And so I started journaling my life outside of work as well. Today, most of that work's done by my electronics, but looking back still makes me excited for the things to come.
Muninn takes that work, photos, calendars, weather, and more, and combines it with prose, a thought, an idea, a reflection, for that day. The way my journals worked, notebooks bulging with glued-in photos, concert tickets, once even my first speeding tocket.
Huginn ok Muninn
fljúga hverjan dag
Jǫrmungrund yfir;
óumk ek of Hugin,
at hann aptr né komit,
þó sjámk meirr um Munin.Huginn and Muninn
Grímnismál 20, in the Poetic Edda. Why it’s Muninn here and Munin there.
fly every day
over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin,
that he come not back,
yet more anxious am I for Muninn.
Muninn