Getting Started
Everything you need to know about using Embra: Personal Archive — from your first entry to your Annual Letter.
Overview
Embra: Personal Archive is a private journaling app that helps you understand your year as you live it. You write daily entries, and Embra does the pattern work — surfacing what your writing reveals through Monthly Insights, the Signals dashboard, and ultimately your Annual Letter.
Everything is stored only on your device. There is no account, no login, and no cloud sync. Your journal is private by design.
The Journal
The Journal tab is your home. It shows your entries in reverse chronological order with a Today's Prompt card at the top when you haven't written yet. Each entry shows the date, an emoji mood tag, and a preview of your text.
Entries are grouped by month so you can see your writing history at a glance. Tapping any entry opens it for reading or editing.
Writing an Entry
- 1Tap the Write button (the pencil icon) in the centre of the tab bar.
- 2Type freely — there's no minimum length. The prompt at the top is optional; ignore it if you have something else on your mind.
- 3Add a mood tag and a location tag using the icons in the toolbar above the keyboard.
- 4Tap Save. Your entry is stored immediately on your device.
Tip: You can write multiple entries on the same day — just tap Write again. All entries for a day are grouped together in the Journal view.
Voice Dictation
You can dictate your journal entry instead of typing. Embra uses Apple's on-device Speech Recognition — your audio is processed entirely on your iPhone and is never sent to a server.
- 1Open the Write screen and tap the microphone icon in the toolbar.
- 2Speak naturally. Embra transcribes your words in real time.
- 3Tap the microphone again to stop. Your transcription appears in the text field for editing before you save.
Privacy note: Voice transcription is entirely on-device. No audio or text from dictation is ever transmitted. The first time you use voice, iOS will ask for microphone and speech recognition permission — both are required for this feature.
Calendar & Stats
The Calendar tab gives you a map of your written days. At the top you'll see four stats at a glance: total entries, current streak, best streak, and total words written.
Month grid
Days with entries are highlighted in amber. Tapping a day shows the entries you wrote on that date. The This Year strip at the top shows your entry count for each month, letting you spot months where you wrote more or less at a glance.
Monthly summary
Below the month grid, a summary shows entries, word count, busiest day, and the dominant mood for that month — giving you a quick sense of what that month felt like in aggregate.
Signals
The Signals tab is where Embra reads your archive back to you. It surfaces patterns in your writing that are too subtle or slow-moving to notice entry by entry. Think of it as the intelligence layer on top of your journal.
Signals has three layers: the Silence Report, the Emergence Log, and a live dashboard of stats, your featured entry of the month, and The Vault — your earned archival achievements.
The Silence Report
What left your pages.
The Silence Report analyzes your full archive to find themes, topics, people, and places that used to appear in your writing — and then quietly stopped. It's the gap between what your past self wrote about and what your present self no longer mentions.
These silences are rarely dramatic. They're gradual: a friend who drifts away, a project abandoned without ceremony, a habit you stopped mentioning around March. The Silence Report names the things you may not have consciously noticed you stopped writing about.
It's not meant to make you feel bad about what's gone — it's meant to help you decide if it should stay gone, or if the silence itself is telling you something.
How Embra calculates it: The app compares topic frequency in your recent writing (the last 60 days) against your full archive history. Topics that appear significantly less often in recent writing than their historical average are surfaced as potential silences. The analysis runs on-device using Apple's Foundation Models.
The Emergence Log
What the year added.
Where the Silence Report tracks what faded, the Emergence Log tracks what arrived. It finds themes, ideas, places, relationships, and ways of thinking that began appearing in your writing — things that weren't part of your vocabulary at the start of the year, but now are.
Emergence can be subtle: starting to write about early mornings, or noticing you mention a new city, a new practice, a different kind of question. The Emergence Log makes these shifts visible, giving them the significance they deserve.
It's your year's growth, written in your own words — surfaced by the patterns you left behind.
How Embra calculates it: The app identifies topics that are significantly more frequent in your recent writing than in your earlier archive. "Emergence" is defined as a topic that had low or no presence in your first third of entries and now appears regularly. All analysis is on-device — no text is sent anywhere.
Signals Dashboard
Below the Silence Report and Emergence Log, the Signals tab shows a live dashboard of your archive stats: total voice memos, unique places written, an Emotional Arc chart mapping mood over time, and a Featured Entry — a randomly surfaced past entry worth revisiting.
The Vault
The Vault tracks archival achievements — milestones earned through consistent writing and exploration of the app. Each achievement has a name and a description that reflects your archiving journey. Achievements are unlocked automatically as you hit milestones; there's nothing to "game."
Monthly Insights
At the end of each calendar month, Embra synthesizes your entries into a Monthly Insight — a short AI-generated reflection on what the month was actually about. It names dominant themes, notes emotional patterns, and surfaces something you wrote that captures the month's essence.
You can also generate a Monthly Insight manually at any point during the month to get a mid-month check-in.
Fully on-device: Monthly Insights are generated using Apple's Foundation Models framework — all processing happens on your iPhone's neural engine. Your journal text never leaves your device for this feature.
Generating an Insight
- 1Open the Signals tab and scroll to the monthly summary card.
- 2Tap Generate Insight. Embra reads your entries for the current month.
- 3The Insight appears in the card and is saved to your archive. You can regenerate it at any time.
The Annual Letter
The Annual Letter is the centerpiece of Embra: Personal Archive. At the end of each year, Embra reads your full archive of entries and writes you a letter — addressed to you, in first person — that reflects the year back as a coherent narrative.
It names what changed, what grew, what was hard, what surprised you. It draws from your actual words, your mood patterns, your Silence Report and Emergence Log data, and your Monthly Insights. It reads like something a thoughtful friend who'd read every entry might write.
Your Annual Letter is stored in the app and is yours to keep. It cannot be regenerated — each letter is a permanent record of that year.
Fully on-device: Like Monthly Insights, the Annual Letter is generated entirely on your device. Your year of writing never leaves your iPhone.
Availability: The Annual Letter becomes available in January of the following year, covering the previous calendar year. You need a minimum of 30 entries from that year for the feature to activate.
Privacy & Your Data
All of your data — entries, insights, voice memos, settings — is stored only on your iPhone. There is no account and no server. Embra cannot access your journal.
Deleting your data
To permanently erase everything: go to Settings → Erase All Archive Data. This deletes all entries, insights, Annual Letters, voice recordings, and preferences. This action cannot be undone.
For more detail, see the full Privacy Policy.
Subscription
Core journaling — writing entries, viewing the Calendar, and browsing your archive — is always free. A subscription is required for AI-powered features: Monthly Insights, the Silence Report, the Emergence Log, and the Annual Letter.
Managing your subscription
- To subscribe: open Settings → Subscription in the app.
- To cancel: go to iOS Settings → [Your Name] → Subscriptions → Embra: Personal Archive.
- To restore a purchase after reinstalling: open Settings → Subscription → Restore Purchases.
Need help with a billing issue? Contact Apple Support directly — all purchases are managed through the App Store. For anything else, email support@embraarchive.com.