My Diary - Daily Diary Journal

Review by eFreeware

Plenty of people start a journal with good intentions and stop within a month. Paper makes it easy to quit: the book is at home when you are not, anyone who picks it up can read it, and there is no simple way to search back through a year of entries. A phone diary solves most of that, as long as it takes privacy seriously and does not make writing a chore.

My Diary - Daily Diary Journal is one of the better-known options in that space. It comes from the developer listed on Google Play as Dairy App & Notes & Audio Editor & Voice Recorder, and the scale is hard to ignore: more than 50 million installs and a 4.8 average across roughly 1.27 million ratings. It has been on the store since September 2020 and was last updated in September 2026.

The pitch is straightforward. This is a free diary with a lock, built for daily entries, private thoughts, moods and moments, with photos, video and audio allowed alongside the text. What I want to work through below is whether the feature set matches the way people actually keep a journal, and who it fits best.

A journal for people who want a lock on it

The core audience here is anyone who wants to write regularly and keep it away from other eyes. That covers a teenager with a phone that gets passed around, a parent tracking a pregnancy or a baby's first year, and an adult who wants somewhere to put work stress or relationship thoughts without leaving a notebook on a desk. The developer's framing is emotional rather than clinical: the app is described as something that listens to you, which sets the tone for a personal record rather than a productivity tool.

The tag system shows how broad the intended use is. Entries can be filed under categories such as travel journals, mood diaries, love diaries, baby diaries, daily diaries, pregnancy diaries and work diaries. That is a wide net, and it suggests the app is meant to be one place for several strands of life rather than a single-purpose log.

If you already keep a journal in a notes app and the only thing missing is privacy, this is a reasonable place to look. If you want a structured planner with reminders and goals, the emphasis here is different: it is about capturing what happened and how you felt, with pictures and sound attached.

Locking entries behind a passcode or fingerprint

Security is the headline feature. You set a passcode for the diary, and the app also supports fingerprint unlocking, which the developer presents as a way to get in quickly without the risk of forgetting the code. For a journal, that combination matters more than it would in most apps: the whole point is that the contents stay yours.

Cloud backup is the second half of that promise. Entries can be synced to Google Drive or Dropbox, which serves two purposes. It protects against losing the phone, and it lets you read the same journal on another device, so a diary started on a phone is not stranded there.

The trade-off is the usual one with cloud storage. Backing up to a third-party service means your entries live somewhere beyond the handset. That is not a flaw specific to this app, but it is worth thinking about before you turn sync on for a diary you would not want anyone else to read.

Writing entries with photos, video and sound

Text is only part of what you can record. The app supports picture and video diaries, and recordings as well, so an entry can carry the sights and sounds of a day rather than a written summary of it. For a travel journal or a record of a child growing up, that is a meaningful difference from typing a paragraph and closing the app.

There is also a mood layer. You pick a mood symbol when you start writing, and the calendar view lets you look back at how those moods shifted over time. Used consistently, that turns the diary into something closer to a light emotional log, which is useful if you want to spot patterns rather than just reread old entries.

Stickers and emojis round out the expressive side, and the developer says new ones are added over time. Between moods, stickers and media, the app is clearly designed for people who want their journal to look like something, not just read like something.

Themes, tags and finding old entries

Customization is handled through themes, backgrounds and fonts. There is a dark theme for writing at night, and you can choose a background for each entry, which the developer ties to making the pages feel personal. None of this changes what the app does, but a diary you enjoy looking at is a diary you are more likely to keep.

Tags do the organizational work. By labeling entries as travel, mood, love, baby, pregnancy, work or daily, you can pull up a category later instead of scrolling through months of writing. For anyone who has kept a journal for years, that is the difference between an archive and a pile.

One small feature worth calling out is eye protection mode, which the developer suggests turning on before you write so your eyes do not tire during a session. It is a minor addition, but it fits an app that expects you to spend real time on the screen rather than dash off two lines.

Exporting, printing and keeping a copy

Entries can be exported to TXT or PDF, and the app supports printing them. That gives you a way out of the ecosystem: a year of writing can become a document you store elsewhere or a printed book you keep on a shelf. For anyone who has worried about a digital diary disappearing with a lost account, having a plain-text or PDF copy is reassuring.

The export options are practical rather than fancy. TXT is the format that will still open in twenty years; PDF is the one you can send to someone or print without fuss. The developer frames printing as a way to turn entries into a souvenir, which is a fair description of what most people would do with it.

This is also the feature that makes the app easier to leave. It suits people who want to keep a long-running written journal in one place.

What you pay, and what the ads and purchases mean

The app is free to download and includes a lock for your entries. It does contain advertising, and it offers in-app purchases. Those are the terms, and they are worth weighing before you commit years of writing to any app.

For a diary, the presence of ads is the part I would think about most. A journal is a private space, and an app with ads sits in a different category from one you pay for outright. That does not make it unusable, but it is a reasonable thing to factor into your choice.

The safest approach is to treat the free version as the product and decide from there.

How it compares with other ways of journaling

The obvious alternatives are a paper notebook, a general notes app, and a dedicated journaling app with a subscription. Paper wins on tactility and loses on search, backup and portability. A notes app wins on ubiquity and usually loses on mood tracking, media handling and the sense that this is a private space.

Against paid journaling services, the appeal here is the price and the install base. The export options mean you are not locked in. The counterweight is advertising.

If privacy is your main concern and you are comfortable managing your own files, a local notes setup may suit you better. If you want the features, the mood calendar and the simplicity of one app, this one is built for exactly that.

A daily diary worth keeping for the long haul

My Diary covers the basics of digital journaling well: a lock, cloud backup, media in entries, moods, tags, themes and export. The 4.8 rating across more than a million ratings suggests a lot of people have stuck with it. It is free, and it does not ask you to learn anything complicated before you can write your first entry.

The reservations are the ones that come with the model. There are ads and in-app purchases. Neither is unusual, but both matter more for a diary than for most apps.

This suits someone who wants a private, searchable, backed-up journal they can write in daily and decorate as they like, and who is comfortable with a free app supported by advertising. If that describes you, it is a reasonable place to start writing.

What's new in version 1.04.17.0918

- Write your online diary and set diary lock to protect your secret - Easy and beautiful personal journal, 100% free - Choose your own theme, background, stickers, fonts to help you embellish personal diaries. - Turn on eye protection before writing journal entries - Backup your private journal to Google Drive and review on different devices. - User friendly and small size