A mood journal built to be kept: check-ins that take seconds, trends over time, and entries that stay on your own device.
A quiet place to notice how you’re actually doing.
I’m an indie developer, and I make small iOS apps on my own. Moodmate is the one I’m working on now: a mood journal, kept deliberately simple. I’m writing about it here as I build it, partly to think out loud. This post covers what the app does and where I am with it.
Why keeping a mood journal is hard
I’ve tried to keep a mood journal more than once, and it never stuck. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that the act of recording took more effort than the moment was worth. By the time I’d opened an app, found the right place, and figured out what to write, the feeling I wanted to capture had already faded.
I’ve noticed the same thing in people around me: someone has a rough week, says they should start writing things down, and a month later has stopped. The entries that do exist are scattered, which makes them hard to learn anything from. And a journal is personal, so it’s easy to feel uneasy about where those notes end up.
None of this is a dramatic problem. It’s just the ordinary friction that keeps a good habit from forming.
How Moodmate approaches it
The idea is a simple promise: log how you feel in seconds, see trends over time, and keep everything on your own device.
To start with, the check-in is quick enough that it doesn’t interrupt the moment. You note how you’re feeling in a few seconds, and that’s the whole interaction. Nothing to compose, nothing to decide beyond the feeling itself.
Over time, those small notes add up to something you can look back on. Not a report card, just a picture of how things have been going, which is hard to see from inside a single day.
What Moodmate will do
- Quick mood check-ins that take seconds. Open it, note how you feel, close it. The point is that it’s easy enough to actually do.
- Look back at trends over time. See how your moods have moved across days and weeks, so trends become visible instead of guessed at.
- Privacy first, stored on your device. Your entries aren’t sent anywhere.
That’s the scope. I’d rather do a few things well than add features that make the app heavier to use.
Questions you might have
Where does my data live? On your device. Moodmate is built so your entries stay there and aren’t sent to a server.
How is this different from jotting moods in a notes app? A notes app can hold anything, which is part of why it’s easy to stop using it for this. Moodmate does one thing: quick check-ins and a view of how you’ve been over time. If a notes app already works for you, that’s genuinely fine.
How can I follow along or get it? There’s a page for the app at /work/moodmate/, and I’ll post updates here as I go. The easiest way to follow along is the wishlist. I’m not promising a date for anything. It’s still in development, and I’d rather be honest about that than guess.
Join the wishlist
If Moodmate sounds like something you’d use, the Moodmate page has the fuller picture. Add your email to the wishlist and I’ll let you know when there’s something real to see. Either way, thanks for reading.