Inwardly User Guide
Everything you need to know about using Inwardly — your private, AI-powered journal. From your first entry to unlocking deep personal insights.
Getting Started
Welcome to Inwardly. Getting set up takes less than two minutes. Here is everything that happens from the moment you open the app for the first time.
When you first launch Inwardly, you will be taken to the sign-up screen. You have three ways to create an account:
After creating your account, Inwardly walks you through a short onboarding flow — three screens that take about 30 seconds.
- 1 Privacy first. This screen explains that your journal entries are encrypted on your device before they are stored. No one — including the Inwardly team — can read your entries. Tap "I understand" to continue.
- 2 Building your habit. A few tips on how to make journaling stick: write at the same time each day, keep entries honest rather than polished, and aim for consistency over length. Tap "Sounds good" to continue.
- 3 Reminder notifications. Inwardly asks if it can send you a daily reminder to write. You can choose a time that suits your routine, or skip this step entirely and enable notifications later in Settings.
Once you are in the app, the bottom tab bar is your primary navigation. It has five items:
- Home — Your daily dashboard. Shows your streak, today's writing prompt, recent entries, and AI highlights.
- Journal — A chronological list of all your entries. Switch to calendar view to browse by date.
- Compose (center pill) — The glowing circular button in the centre. Tap it to start a new journal entry from anywhere in the app.
- Insights — Your AI-powered emotional dashboard. Weekly reviews, pattern detection, and mood analytics.
- Settings — Account, notifications, appearance, privacy, and subscription management.
Writing Journal Entries
Every entry starts with a single tap. Inwardly gets out of your way so you can focus on what matters: writing.
- 1 Tap the glowing circular button in the centre of the tab bar, or tap "Write Today's Entry" on the Home screen.
- 2 The new entry screen slides up as a modal. The date and time are set automatically.
- 3 You will see a writing prompt at the top — a question or idea to get you started. You can ignore it and write freely, or let it guide you.
- 4 Tap the text area below the prompt and your keyboard appears. Start typing. There is no minimum length requirement.
- 5 When you are done, tap Save in the top-right corner. To discard without saving, tap Cancel in the top-left.
Below the text area you will find the mood selector. Tap one of the five options to log how you are feeling today. This data feeds the mood charts in your Insights tab over time.
Mood is optional — you can save an entry without selecting one. However, selecting a mood each time gives the AI much more to work with when generating your Insights.
Premium users can tag their entries with the location where they were written. This lets you look back and see that you wrote your best entries from the coffee shop on Saturdays, or that your mood dips when you are travelling for work.
- 1 In the entry toolbar at the bottom of the screen, tap the location pin icon.
- 2 Inwardly will request location permission if it has not already been granted. Tap Allow While Using App.
- 3 Your current city and neighbourhood appear as a tag beneath the mood selector. Tap it again to remove it.
Premium users can attach up to three photos per entry. Photos are stored securely alongside your encrypted text.
- 1 Tap the photo icon in the entry toolbar.
- 2 Choose from your Photo Library or take a new photo with your Camera.
- 3 Selected photos appear as thumbnails in the entry. Tap a thumbnail to remove it.
Templates are structured starting points that guide your writing with a set of fields or prompts. They are great for routines like a morning reflection or a weekly review.
- 1 Tap the template icon (grid icon) in the entry toolbar.
- 2 A picker slides up showing all available templates — system templates are listed first, followed by any custom templates you have created.
- 3 Tap a template to select it. The entry area transforms to show the template's structured fields.
- 4 Fill in each field at your own pace. When you save, all fields are combined into a single entry.
Managing Your Journal
The Journal tab is where all your entries live. Browse, filter, search, edit, and delete — everything you need to manage your writing over time.
Tap the Journal tab to see all your entries. They are grouped by month, with the most recent month at the top. Each entry card shows:
- The date and time the entry was written
- Your mood emoji for that entry (if selected)
- A preview of the first line of the entry
- The journal it belongs to (if you use multiple journals)
- A photo thumbnail if photos were attached
Tap any entry card to open and read the full entry.
In the top-right of the Journal screen you will find a toggle to switch between List and Calendar views.
- List view — A chronological feed of all entries grouped by month. Ideal for reading and browsing recent writing.
- Calendar view — A monthly calendar grid where each day with an entry shows a small dot. Tap any date to open a panel showing all entries written on that day. Great for finding entries by date or checking your writing consistency.
If you have created multiple journals (for example, a personal journal and a work journal), pill-shaped filter buttons appear at the top of the journal list. Tap a pill to show only entries from that journal. Tap All to show everything.
- 1 Tap an entry card to open it in the detail view.
- 2 Tap the Edit button in the top-right corner to enter edit mode.
- 3 Make your changes. The mood selector and toolbar are available just as when writing a new entry.
- 4 Tap Save to keep your changes, or Cancel to discard them.
- 1 Open the entry you want to delete.
- 2 Tap the trash icon (delete button) in the top-right corner.
- 3 Confirm deletion in the prompt that appears. This action cannot be undone.
Home Screen
The Home screen is your daily starting point. It is personalised to you and updates as you write more entries.
At the top of the Home screen you will see a greeting that changes based on the time of day — "Good morning", "Good afternoon", or "Good evening" — along with your display name and today's date. This is a small but intentional detail: the app knows what time it is for you.
Beneath the greeting sits a stats card showing two numbers:
- Current streak — The number of consecutive calendar days on which you have written at least one entry. A flame icon accompanies this. The streak resets if you miss a full day.
- Total entries — The cumulative count of all entries you have ever written in Inwardly.
The Prompt Card in the middle of the Home screen shows today's writing prompt. It is designed to help you start — not to dictate what you write.
For free users, prompts are thoughtfully curated and change daily. For Inwardly+ subscribers, the AI generates a personalised prompt based on your recent entries and emotional patterns — it might reference something you wrote last week, or gently revisit a theme that has come up repeatedly.
Tap "Write Today's Entry" below the prompt card to open the new entry screen with the prompt already visible.
The lower portion of the Home screen shows a "This Month" section — a scrollable horizontal row of recent entry cards. Each card shows the date, mood, and a snippet of the entry. Tap any card to read the full entry.
If you have not written this month yet, the section shows an encouraging nudge instead.
Once you have been using Inwardly for more than a year, a special card appears on the Home screen when you have written an entry on this same calendar date in a previous year. It shows a preview of what you were thinking and feeling exactly one year ago (or more).
This is one of the most personally meaningful features of the app — seeing your own growth in your own words.
After you write your first entry, a card appears on the Home screen encouraging you to set up a recovery passphrase. This ensures that if you ever switch to a new phone or reinstall the app, you can recover access to your encrypted entries.
Tap "Set up" to create your passphrase now. Tap the link below it if you are signing in on a new device and need to restore your key from a previous backup.
This nudge disappears once you have set up a recovery passphrase.
AI Insights Inwardly+
The Insights tab is where Inwardly transforms your writing into self-understanding. It takes time to build — but it becomes one of the most powerful parts of the app.
The first section of the Insights tab is your mood chart. It plots your mood scores (1–5) over time as a smooth line graph. Use the toggle above the chart to switch between 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days.
Below the chart, four stat boxes give you a quick summary of the selected period:
- Avg mood — Your average mood score across all entries in the selected window
- Most common — The mood you selected most often (e.g., "Good")
- Range — The spread between your lowest and highest mood entries (e.g., "Rough → Great")
- Entries — How many entries were written in the selected period
Every week, Inwardly's AI reads your entries from the past 7 days and writes a short, warm reflection on your week. This is not a summary of what happened — it is an observation of how you seemed to be feeling, what themes came up, and what might be worth paying attention to.
Think of it as a thoughtful friend who read your diary and gently reflected it back to you.
The weekly review refreshes automatically. If you write more entries after it was generated, you can regenerate it using the on-demand review button.
The Patterns section surfaces recurring themes and emotional triggers that appear across your entries over time. These are things you might not notice day to day — but the AI can see them across weeks and months of writing.
Examples of patterns Inwardly might detect:
- "You tend to feel anxious on Sunday evenings."
- "Your mood improves significantly on days you mention exercise or being outside."
- "You have written about feeling underappreciated at work three times in the past month."
- "Your best entries tend to be written on weekday mornings."
Each pattern is presented as a short, compassionate observation — not a diagnosis. The AI is noticing, not prescribing.
Patterns require at least 10 entries to activate and become richer the longer you use the app.
Do not want to wait for the automatic weekly review? The On-Demand Review section lets you generate a review of any period whenever you want.
- 1 Scroll to the ON-DEMAND REVIEW section in the Insights tab.
- 2 Choose your timeframe: Past week or Past month.
- 3 Tap Generate Review. The AI reads your entries and writes a personalised reflection. This takes 5–15 seconds.
- 4 Read your review. You can generate a new one at any time.
Once per month, Inwardly generates a longer, more in-depth Monthly Report — a written summary of your entire emotional journey over the past 30 days. It highlights growth moments, recurring struggles, wins worth celebrating, and threads worth exploring going forward.
Access your Monthly Report from a card on the Home screen, or navigate to it via the Report screen (tap the card in the Home screen "This Month" section).
Monthly reports are warm, coach-like, and personal. They are written in a narrative style, not bullet points.
Journals & Organization
You can keep all your entries in one journal, or create separate journals for different areas of your life — a personal journal, a work journal, a travel journal, or whatever makes sense for you.
- 1 Go to the Journal tab.
- 2 Tap the + button next to the journal filter pills at the top of the screen.
- 3 Enter a name for your new journal (for example, "Work", "Travel", or "Morning Pages").
- 4 Tap Create. The new journal appears as a filter pill at the top of the journal list.
When writing a new entry, a journal picker appears in the toolbar at the bottom of the entry screen. Tap it to select which journal this entry belongs to. Your most recently used journal is selected by default.
You can also reassign an existing entry to a different journal by opening the entry, entering edit mode, and changing the journal picker selection.
To rename a journal or change its icon:
- 1 Go to the Journal tab.
- 2 Long press on the journal's pill button in the filter row at the top.
- 3 The journal enters edit mode — tap the name or icon to change it.
- 4 Tap Done to save your changes.
To delete a journal:
- 1 Go to the Journal tab.
- 2 Long press on the journal's pill button.
- 3 When edit mode appears, tap the Delete option.
- 4 Confirm the deletion. Entries from the deleted journal are moved to your default journal.
Templates
Templates give your journaling sessions structure. Instead of staring at a blank page, you start with a set of questions or fields that guide your writing.
Inwardly ships with six built-in templates, ready to use immediately:
- Daily Planner — Plan your day with priorities, tasks, and intentions.
- Workout Log — Track your exercise, reps, sets, and how your body felt.
- Fishing Journal — Log your catches, conditions, location, and tackle.
- Grocery List — Organise your shopping by category.
- Productivity Tracker — Review what you accomplished and where time went.
- Collection Log — Document items in any collection with notes and details.
- 1 Go to Settings → Templates.
- 2 Tap New Template.
- 3 Give your template a name and add fields. Each field has a label (the question or prompt) and a text area for the answer.
- 4 Tap Save Template. It will now appear in the template picker when writing a new entry.
Go to Settings → Templates to see all your templates. From here you can edit custom templates, delete ones you no longer use, and reorder them. System templates cannot be deleted, but they can be hidden from the picker.
Privacy & Encryption
Your journal is private by default, by design, and by architecture. Here is exactly how it works — in plain language.
Every journal entry is encrypted on your device using AES-256-CTR — the same standard used to protect financial data and classified government communications — before it ever leaves your phone.
Your encryption key is generated the first time you open the app and is stored exclusively in your device's iOS Keychain — a hardware-protected secure enclave. The key never touches our servers.
What this means in practice:
- Inwardly employees cannot read your entries — ever. Even if compelled by a court order, we do not have your key.
- If our servers were ever compromised, your entries would be unreadable gibberish without your key.
- Your entries are never used to train AI models — neither ours nor Anthropic's.
Because your encryption key is stored only on your device, if you ever reinstall the app or switch to a new iPhone, you will not be able to decrypt your existing entries without a backup of your key.
A recovery passphrase solves this. When you set one up, Inwardly wraps your encryption key with your passphrase and stores the wrapped (encrypted) version on our servers. Your passphrase is never stored — only the wrapped key is.
- 1 Go to Settings → Data & Privacy → Recovery Passphrase.
- 2 Enter a strong passphrase — at least 12 characters. Do not use a common password. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.
- 3 Confirm the passphrase and tap Save.
If you have set up a recovery passphrase and sign into Inwardly on a new device, the app detects that you have an existing key backup and shows a recovery screen automatically.
- 1 Sign into your account on the new device.
- 2 Inwardly shows the Recovery Screen, explaining that it found an encrypted key backup for your account.
- 3 Enter your recovery passphrase and tap Restore.
- 4 Your encryption key is restored to this device's Keychain. Your existing entries are now readable.
You can also manually trigger key sync from an existing device via Settings → Data & Privacy → Sync encryption key. This is useful if you use Inwardly on multiple devices simultaneously.
For an extra layer of physical privacy, you can require Face ID or Touch ID to open Inwardly. Enable this in Settings → Data & Privacy → App Lock.
With App Lock enabled, anyone who picks up your phone cannot open your journal without your biometric — even if your phone is unlocked.
Settings
Settings is organised into logical groups. Here is a full reference of every option and what it does.
- Display name — The name shown in your personalised greeting on the Home screen. Tap to edit.
- Email address — The email associated with your account. Shown for reference.
- Inwardly+ — Shows your current subscription status and a link to manage or restore purchases.
- Daily reminder — Toggle push notifications on or off. When enabled, Inwardly sends you a gentle nudge each day to write.
- Reminder time — Tap the time to change when your daily notification is delivered. The default is 8:00 PM.
- Theme — Choose between Light, Dark, or System. System follows your iOS appearance setting automatically.
- Your data — Informational: confirms that all entries are encrypted on-device before storage.
- AI training — Informational: confirms that your entries are never used to train AI models.
- App Lock — Toggle Face ID / Touch ID requirement to open the app.
- Share Analytics — Toggle whether anonymous usage analytics are sent to help improve the app. No journal content is ever included.
- Recovery Passphrase — Set or update your encryption key recovery passphrase.
- Sync encryption key — Restore your encryption key from a backup on another device (only visible when a backup exists).
- Export My Data — Download all your journal entries as JSON or plain text.
- Sign Out — Signs you out of your account on this device. Your encrypted entries remain on the server.
- Delete Account — Permanently deletes your account and all associated data from Inwardly's servers. This is a two-step confirmation and cannot be undone. Export your data first if you want a local copy.
Data Export
Your journal belongs to you. Export a complete copy of your writing at any time — no subscription required.
- 1 Go to Settings → Data & Privacy → Export My Data.
- 2 Choose your format: JSON or Plain Text.
- 3 Tap Export. Inwardly decrypts your entries on-device and packages them.
- 4 The iOS Share Sheet appears. Save to Files, share via AirDrop, send via email, or save to any other app.
- JSON format — A structured data file containing all entry metadata (date, mood, journal name, location) and full text content. Best for importing into another app, archiving to a database, or processing programmatically.
- Plain text format — A human-readable
.txtfile with each entry formatted chronologically, including the date, mood, and full text. Best for reading in any text editor or printing as a keepsake.
Troubleshooting
Something not working as expected? Here are solutions to the most common issues.
This happens when Inwardly cannot find the correct encryption key on your device — most commonly after reinstalling the app or signing in on a new device.
If you set up a recovery passphrase: Go to Settings → Data & Privacy → Sync encryption key, enter your passphrase, and tap Restore. Your entries will be readable immediately.
If you did not set up a recovery passphrase: Unfortunately, your previous entries cannot be recovered because the encryption key is gone. This is why we strongly recommend setting up a recovery passphrase as soon as you start using the app. Going forward, new entries written on this device will be readable.
We are very sorry — if you have lost your recovery passphrase, your encrypted entries from before the loss are permanently unrecoverable. This is by design: we never store your passphrase, which means we cannot be compelled to hand it over, but it also means we cannot help if it is forgotten.
If you still have access to your original device and the app is still installed, your encryption key may still be in the Keychain. In that case, do not uninstall the app. Set up a new recovery passphrase from that device immediately to create a new backup.
If you are already locked out, tap "Start fresh" on the recovery screen. A new encryption key is generated and you can begin writing again. Your account and any future entries are not affected.
Streaks require at least one journal entry per calendar day in your local timezone. The streak counter resets at midnight.
If you wrote an entry at 11:58 PM and another at 12:02 AM, both entries count — but the second is attributed to the new calendar day. If you wrote nothing on a specific date, that day breaks the streak.
Check the Calendar view in the Journal tab to see exactly which days had entries, which can help identify where the gap occurred.
Pattern detection requires a minimum of 10 journal entries before it activates. The Insights tab shows a progress indicator with how many entries you have written and how many are needed.
If you have more than 10 entries and insights are still not appearing, check that your Inwardly+ subscription is active (Settings → Inwardly+). If it is active and the issue persists, try pulling down to refresh the Insights tab, or contact support.
If your daily reminder is not appearing, work through this checklist:
- 1 Open iOS Settings → Notifications → Inwardly and confirm that "Allow Notifications" is turned on.
- 2 In Inwardly Settings, confirm that Daily Reminder is toggled on and the time is set correctly.
- 3 Check that Focus / Do Not Disturb is not blocking notifications at your chosen reminder time.
- 4 If the issue persists, toggle the Daily Reminder off and back on in Inwardly Settings. This re-schedules the notification.
Google sign-in requires an internet connection and an active Google account. Try the following:
- Check that you have an active internet connection (Wi-Fi or cellular).
- Try closing and reopening the app, then attempting sign-in again.
- If Google sign-in still fails, use your email and password as an alternative, or sign in with Apple.
- Contact support at support@goinwardly.app if the issue persists.
We are a small team and we read every support email personally. If you are running into something not covered in this guide, reach out and we will get back to you as quickly as we can.
Email: support@goinwardly.app
When contacting support, it helps to include:
- Your iOS version and iPhone model
- A description of what you were trying to do when the issue occurred
- Whether you are on the free tier or Inwardly+
inwardly
Your thoughts, understood.
© 2026 Inwardly. All rights reserved.