Every entry, sealed on the device
Your journal lives in a SQLCipher-encrypted database. Its key is held by your phone’s hardware-backed secure storage (Android Keystore or iOS Keychain), not in a file anyone can copy.
Your journal. Your phone. Nobody else.
Samaru is a private journal, mood tracker and habit tracker in one app. No account, no cloud, no one reading over your shoulder. Every entry, photo and voice note is encrypted on your phone, and it stays there.
Samaru (සමරු) is Sinhala for “commemorative”: a place to keep the days worth remembering.
Why let big tech train AI on your diary?
Your journal holds your worst days, your best ideas and the things you’ve never said out loud. It shouldn’t be someone’s training data, ad profile or breach headline. Samaru is built so it can’t be.
- No account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to leak.
- No cloud. We don’t run a server for your journal. We never see a word.
- No AI training. Mood and sentiment are worked out on your phone. Your writing never goes to a remote model.
- No ads, no trackers. The app has no advertising or analytics SDKs. Not one.
See it in action
Calm, clear and completely yours.
Locked down
Encrypted everywhere. Even your backups.
Privacy isn’t a setting you have to find. It’s on from the first entry.
Photos and voice notes too
Attachments are encrypted at rest and only decrypted while you look at them or play them. The plain copy the camera or recorder hands over is deleted straight away.
Backups only you can open
Backups are encrypted with a password only you know before they leave the app. Save them to any folder, even a cloud-synced one: your provider only ever sees scrambled bytes.
Locked when you look away
Unlock with your fingerprint, face or device passcode. Samaru hides itself in the app switcher on both platforms, and Android blocks screenshots outright.
Your photos don’t give you away
GPS location, camera model and capture time are removed from photos before they’re stored or shared. A picture shows what you meant it to, and nothing more.
Built for the long haul
Shared entries are signed with both classic ECDSA and post-quantum ML-DSA, and Android secrets are sealed with AES-256 rather than RSA. A journal is for life; its protection should be too.
Write your way
Capture the day however it comes.
Long reflections, a quick line between meetings, a photo, or just your voice.
Plain writing, with just enough polish
Bold, italics and bullet lists, with a live word count. Entries save themselves a few seconds after you stop typing, and tell you they’re safe “on device”.
Pictures, kept private
Snap or pick photos for any entry. They’re encrypted into Samaru’s own vault, not left loose in your gallery.
Talk it out
Record up to five minutes with a live waveform. Recording happens on the phone and audio is never transmitted.
Tags, place and weather
Tag entries to find them later. Add a location only when you choose to, and Samaru notes the weather, sending nothing but rounded coordinates.
Jot it before it’s gone
On Android, tap the home screen widget and write a note, snap a photo or record a voice note without unlocking. It can add to your journal but never shows what’s already in it.
A gentle nudge, on your schedule
Pick a time for a daily reminder. It’s scheduled on the phone, with no push server involved.
Know yourself
See the patterns. Keep the privacy.
Insights that would usually need a server, worked out on your phone and never sent anywhere.
More than happy or sad
Drag a dot across a map of how positive and how energized you feel. Samaru names it: Joyful, Calm, Thoughtful, Neutral, Sad, Frustrated or Anxious.
Track what actually matters
Nine built-in habits, from sleep and exercise to coffee and meditation, plus your own custom habits with any emoji you like.
What lifts your mood?
See how each habit lines up with how you feel. Find out whether that walk, that book or that eighth hour of sleep really makes a difference.
Sentiment, without the snooping
An on-device model reads the tone of each entry and charts it over time. Your words are analysed where they were written and go nowhere else.
Build the habit of writing
Keep a daily streak, see each month as a heatmap and share a streak card that shows your streak and nothing of what you wrote.
On this day
Samaru brings back what you wrote on the same date in earlier years, so the days worth remembering actually get remembered.
Is your phone stressing you out?
On Android, optionally count how many notifications arrive each day and compare busy days with your mood. Samaru counts them; it never reads them.
Find anything in seconds
Full-text search across every entry, ranked by relevance, runs entirely on the phone. Browse every photo and voice note in one gallery, the Vault.
No lock-in
Your data stays with you, and moves with you.
Owning your journal means you can take it anywhere, on your terms.
Set it and forget it
Schedule encrypted backups to a folder you pick. If one ever fails, Samaru tells you instead of leaving you guessing.
Bring your old journal
Coming from Day One or Diarium? Import your exports, photos included, and pick up where you left off.
Share one entry, not your life
Send a single entry as a password-protected, signed file. The recipient sees who sent it and whether it was changed. Location stays out unless you add it.
Gone means gone
Delete an entry and its encrypted photos and voice notes go with it. There’s no server copy for anyone to keep.
Fair pricing
Pay once. Own it. No subscription.
- 14 days free with every feature unlocked.
- One-time purchase to keep writing new entries after that.
- Never held hostage. Reading, editing, searching, exporting and backing up your entries is always free.
- No ads, ever. You’re the customer, not the product.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Does Samaru work offline?
Yes. Writing, reading, searching, insights and backups all work with no connection. The only optional network call is a weather lookup when you choose to add a location to an entry.
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, login or profile. There is also no server that stores or syncs your journal, so there is nothing to sign in to.
Is my journal used to train AI?
No. Your entries never reach us, so they can’t be used to train anything. Sentiment analysis runs on your phone with an on-device model, and your writing is never sent to a remote AI service.
How is my data encrypted?
Entries are stored in a SQLCipher-encrypted database whose key lives in the Android Keystore or iOS Keychain. Photos and voice notes are encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Backups are encrypted with AES-256-GCM using a key derived from your password with Argon2id.
What happens if I lose my phone?
Turn on automatic encrypted backups to a folder you choose, such as one synced by your cloud drive. Restore the file on a new phone with your backup password. Without a backup, nobody, including us, can recover your journal. That’s the price of real privacy.
How much does it cost?
Free to download with a 14-day trial of every feature, then a one-time purchase keeps new entries coming. No subscription, and your existing entries are never locked.
Can I move my journal from Day One or Diarium?
Yes. Samaru imports Day One and Diarium exports, including photos, which are stripped of identifying metadata on the way in.
Is Samaru on iPhone and Android?
Yes. Samaru is launching on the App Store for iPhone and on Google Play for Android at the same time, with the same privacy and encryption on both.
No account. No cloud. No AI training. Your entries stay on your phone.