Frequently Asked Questions

Check out this video tutorial series:

Custom Journal App Tutorials

Here is some inspiration, along with templates you can use right away:

• Journal templates for productivity
• Daily journal template

On the Manage Template page, open the menu in the top right corner and choose Share Template. Then select a method of sharing (email, for example). Your friend needs to have Custom Journal installed. When they open the link on their mobile device, they should choose to open it with the Custom Journal app rather than their web browser. From there they can save the template and start journaling with it right away.

See this page for more details.

How shared templates work: shared templates are not uploaded to the website. I never store or log any template data. All the data is encoded into the URL itself, which you can send directly to the recipient. The URL is the data — the app simply decodes it for the recipient without contacting any server. This also means you can post shared URLs on any website for others to use, and they will keep working regardless of whether this website exists.

On the Edit Template page, there is a SCHEDULE tab right below the title bar. Tapping it opens the template scheduling menu, where you can schedule a template on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. If a template is scheduled for the day, it appears in a "Scheduled Templates" section on the current day's entry to remind you to use it. If you purchase Premium, you can also schedule a notification alert for each template.

To change the background:

1. Choose "Change background image" from the settings menu and pick an image.
2. A new window will pop up allowing you to crop the image. Press "CROP" in the top right.
3. You will do this twice — once for vertical and once for horizontal — so just hit "CROP" again.

That's it. The image should now be set as your background.

There is a settings option called "Sync via Google Drive". When you enable it, an option to sync appears in the top right menu. This syncs your journal using your own Google Drive as the server, so you can sync up on one device and sync down on the other. Changes are merged between devices by taking the most recently updated version of each journal entry. (Be careful to sync first if you are editing the same entry on both devices at the same time.)

Google reserves a special app data folder for data created by an app. This prevents accidental deletion and adds security, but it also means you can't browse the data directly. If you want to delete the sync file stored there, you can:

1. Go to https://drive.google.com and log in with the same Google account you used to sync.
2. Click the gear icon in the top right and select Settings from the menu.
3. Click "Manage Apps" in the left navigation drawer.
4. Open the Options dropdown next to the app — it includes an option to delete the app data.

Make sure you have the Google Drive Android app installed. This gives you the option in the menus to access Google Drive.

Sorry, not at the moment, though it's possible in the future. In the meantime, the best option might be an Android tablet with a keyboard, or a Chromebook.

Some device manufacturers aggressively stop background processes. Please try the steps for your specific manufacturer at https://dontkillmyapp.com/ to make sure the app can run in the background.