Cairn
A quiet, private journal for iPhone — and a way to find the patterns in your days.
Write a few sentences each day. Cairn’s on-device intelligence quietly reads what you wrote and finds the patterns — your mood, the people who keep showing up, the things you keep returning to. Then it reflects what runs underneath back to you — across the week, the month, and the year.
Your words never leave your iPhone. No servers. No accounts. No analytics. No ads.
What Cairn does
- A beautiful serif writing surface — the kind of paper you want to return to
- Mood, people, places, and themes are tagged on-device, automatically
- Patterns: see your mood across the last 30 days, the things you wrote about most, your streak
- Synthesis ×3 (Premium): an honest paragraph for your week, your month, and your year — what recurred, what arced, the through-line underneath
- Voice journaling (Premium): hold the mic and watch your words land — on-device transcription, no audio kept
- Voice notes on Apple Watch (Premium): tap, speak, send — your iPhone transcribes on-device, then deletes the audio
- App lock (Premium): Face ID and a private PIN keep Cairn closed when your phone isn’t
- Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, Siri & Shortcuts, up to six daily "How are you?" reminders you control
- Export to Markdown any time — your words belong to you
Privacy, as a feature
Most journaling apps quietly send your most intimate writing through a third-party API, store it on someone else’s server, and use it to train a model. Cairn doesn’t. Apple’s Foundation Models framework lets the AI run entirely on your iPhone — fast, free, offline. Voice journaling, voice notes from the Watch, and the optional app lock all stay on-device too.
Cairn collects no data. Not your name, not analytics, not crash reports tied to you. Nothing leaves your phone.
Premium
Cairn is free to use. Premium unlocks weekly, monthly, and yearly synthesis; voice journaling on iPhone; voice notes on Apple Watch; an app lock with Face ID and PIN; and four themes. Choose monthly, annual (with a 7-day free trial), or a one-time lifetime purchase.
Get Cairn
Cairn is live on the App Store for iPhone. Free to download — Premium is optional.
Questions, ideas, or feedback? Email Gareth@onliware.ie.