---
title: "Yours to keep | Ember"
description: "Who can read your journal, and what happens when the app is gone? The honest answers about Ember's local-first architecture."
url: https://ember.mov/yours-to-keep/
language: en
---

Ember • Privacy & Data

# Yours to keep

![A mother lies in a large white bed, her head beside her sleeping newborn, both almost lost in white sheets.](https://ember.mov/assets/art/sorolla-mother.webp)

*Joaquín Sorolla, Mother, 1895*

Two questions worth asking of anything you'd trust with a diary: who can read this, and what happens to it when the app is gone?

A journal gets held to a higher standard than most software, and it should. People ask me two things before they'll write anything real in one: who can see this, and what happens when you get bored and move on? Both are fair. Here are the actual answers, not the reassuring marketing version.

## There's no account, and no server holding your journal

You don't sign up for Ember. There's no email, no password, no profile, and nothing to log into. When you write, Ember saves straight to your device's own storage, the way any app on your Mac or iPhone keeps its documents.

This isn't a policy I could quietly change later. There is no server that holds your entries, so there is no switch to flip. Your writing never reaches me because there's nowhere for it to arrive. If you use sync, which is part of Ember Plus, it runs through your own private iCloud, encrypted by Apple. Ember never sees it.

## Everything that leaves your device

Ember works fully offline. Your writing is never sent to Ember or to any AI. The only things that use the network are:

- **Anonymous usage analytics:** We use PostHog to see aggregate data (like how many people use a specific feature) to help fix bugs. This is on by default and tied to a random device identifier. You can turn it off in Settings, under Privacy, with "Share anonymous usage". Your entries, people, places, and names never leave your device this way.
- **Weather and place lookups:** If you add a place or weather to an entry, Apple's own services turn coordinates into a place name and fetch the weather. If you switch on "Add place and weather" in Settings, this happens for new entries automatically. It is off by default.
- **Link previews:** When you paste a link, Ember fetches the preview from the linked site.
- **Apple Music search:** When you attach a song to an entry, Ember asks Apple Music to find it.
- **iCloud sync (Ember Plus):** If you use Plus, your journal syncs through your own private iCloud, encrypted by Apple. Ember never sees it. Without Plus, each device keeps its own journal.

## Your journal, without Ember

Every journal app keeps your entries in a database of its own, and Ember is no different. What matters is whether you can get all of it back out. In Ember you can, at any time and for free: one export gives you your whole journal as open, documented JSON, with your original photos.

That export is plain JSON you can open in any code editor, search with standard terminal tools, keep as a backup, and build your own tools on top of. You can see the full specification for the format in [the archive format reference](https://ember.mov/help/archive-format). Ember can also save entries and stories as PDFs, and print your whole journal as a book.

## If I disappear

This is the one people are too polite to ask, so let me answer it plainly. I run Ember. I could stop, by choice, by circumstance, or by getting hit by a bus. A journal you'll still want in twenty years shouldn't depend on my continued attendance.

Because Ember is entirely native to Apple's platforms and local-first, it never locks you out because a server check failed. There are no DRM servers to go offline. If the website goes down forever, the app on your Mac, iPhone and iPad keeps working.

And the best protection is the simplest: export now and then and keep the file somewhere safe. Even in the absolute worst case, where Apple's platforms change so much that the app stops running in 15 years, that export stays readable and parseable by any developer on earth.

Your life archive belongs to you.

### Time to start writing?

Ember is a private life archive for your Mac, iPhone and iPad. Local-first, no lock-in, no AI, no noise.

[Download on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6775558241?pt=128905247&ct=site&mt=8)