I've spent the last year of nights and weekends (long nights — we had our third kid in April) designing, building, and iterating on a privacy-first journaling app based on my psychologist wife's clinical area of expertise — value and identity alignment[0].

You can check it out at www.clearlyhq.com.

Why a journaling app?

We've had tens of thousands of people over the last two years take the Values Navigator[1] assessment, a little web tool I put together based on decades of cross-cultural research by Dr. Shalom Schwartz, which my wife uses extensively in her practice. The main feedback we've gotten from people has been: ok, but now what?

In her clinical practice, my wife often recommends journaling to drive consistent introspection and growth, so together we designed an app that lets you rate and describe your "alignment" with your values every day.

We've also partnered with other psychologists and experts on writing prompts in areas like career and relationships to help you reflect on how your values show up in your day-to-day experience.

On to the tech stuff!

After three or four false starts on learning iOS development, things finally clicked with SwiftUI + SwiftData. I love how SwiftData lets you transparently replicate the database to the user's private iCloud, so we can keep your data safe without our being able to ever see any of it.

This also why we decided to stick with iOS-only — while it's totally possible to provide this level of privacy-by-design on web and Android, it is effectively built in to iOS if you really buy into Apple's way of doing things (for better or worse).

We also decided to not have any form of account or registration to keep it as private as possible. The only server-side components are the writing prompts, which the app downloads out of a Supabase instance, and RevenueCat, which we will use to manage a premium tier subscription to give access to features like charts/trends and (maybe?) on-device private AI.

Feedback is of course welcome! Although the baby is sleeping through the night now, I'll still hopefully have a few hours a week to keep shipping fixes and new features.

[0]: https://hbr.org/2019/12/what-happens-when-your-career-become... [1]: https://azimuthpsych.com/values-navigator