How the AI runs on your device.
A plain, verifiable account of how Inner Journal generates journaling insights without the cloud, what it needs to run, and exactly what is encrypted when you sync.
Optional AI that reads your diary — on your phone, not in the cloud.
AI Core is an optional feature. When you turn it on and install the model, Inner Journal writes a month overview, answers free-form questions about your entries, and suggests a mood — entirely on your device. Your entries are never sent to a server to be analysed, and the AI's output is stored only on your phone.
When AI Core is enabled and the model is installed, all AI inference runs entirely on-device with no network. It works in airplane mode, and your entries never leave the device for AI.
Month overview
A short, honest summary of how your month read — built from your own entries, generated on your phone.
Ask your month
Free-form questions answered from your own pages — never the cloud.
Mood suggestion
A proposed mood tag inferred from your text. With AI off, it falls back to a local keyword scan. You always decide.
The models, and where they run.
On Android, inference runs through Google's LiteRT runtime (via the flutter_gemma / MediaPipe GenAI stack). You pick one of three open models, downloaded once from Hugging Face. Gemma 4 E2B and Qwen3 0.6B power every AI feature; a third, lighter model suggests moods only. On a 3-5 GB device, the automatic choice is Qwen3 0.6B.
Gemma 4 E2B
Google's Gemma 4 E2B (Apache-2.0; model id gemma-4-E2B-it), a ~2.6 GB one-time download. The app requires a device with at least about 5 GB of RAM to use it.
Qwen3 0.6B
A lighter alternative of about 614 MB that runs on the CPU; the app requires about 2 GB of RAM.
Gemma 3 1B
Google's Gemma 3 1B (model id Gemma3-1B-IT), a q4-quantized ~557 MB download that needs about 3 GB of RAM. It appears as the Standard tier and suggests moods only - not month overviews or ask-your-month - and is always a manual choice, never auto-selected.
The model is downloaded once, when you ask for it, from Hugging Face. After that, inference needs no network at all.
Requires Android 8.0 or newer, 64-bit (arm64).
On iPhone, the AI uses Apple Intelligence.
On iPhone, the AI runs on Apple's on-device foundation models (Apple Intelligence), available on iOS 26 and later. There is no model download, because the system provides the model. As on Android, generation happens entirely on the device, and your entries are never sent away to be analysed.
Four guarantees behind the AI.
The features are designed so that understanding your diary never means uploading it.
- 01
On-device processing
Generation happens on your phone's own hardware. Your raw entries are never uploaded to a server to be read.
- 02
Works in airplane mode
Once the model is installed, the AI features need no internet connection at all.
- 03
Yours to switch on
AI Core is optional and stays off until you enable it. The core diary works fully without it.
- 04
Your data stays yours
No analysis of your entry content leaves the device. No ad targeting, no profiling, no selling your thoughts.
End-to-end encryption, when you want it.
Cloud sync is optional. If you set a passphrase, your entries are encrypted on your device before they sync — with a key only you hold.
AES-256-GCM + PBKDF2
Each payload is encrypted with AES-256-GCM (a fresh 12-byte nonce and 16-byte tag). Your passphrase is stretched into a 256-bit key with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 over 600,000 iterations. The exact same scheme runs on mobile and on the web.
Only you hold the key
We store encrypted blobs we cannot read. Lose the passphrase and the data cannot be recovered — not even by us.
What is and isn't encrypted
Encryption protects your synced entry text and media. A small set of metadata — dates, mood, tags, and sync identifiers — stays cleartext so deletions and backups work. On your device, entries live in local storage protected by the OS sandbox.
Local-first by default.
Your diary is stored on your device first. Cloud sync is an optional Plus feature — without it, your journal never leaves your phone.
Ready to write down your thoughts?
Open it when you have something to say. Close it when you don't.
