Yaja (Yet Another Journaling App)

🌐 Official Website | 💖 Support & Donate

Yaja is a privacy-first, markdown-based personal journaling application for Android. Built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, Yaja treats your journal entries as actionable records—merging text capture, inline tasks, location/people tracking, and rich automated insights into a single unified flow.

Important

What Yaja is NOT: Yaja is not a productivity app, a standard todo app, or a general-purpose calendar app.

What Yaja IS: It is a private, personal space where you can manage your personal life, capture thoughts, and track tasks without any fear of your data being uploaded, processed, or shared in the cloud. Everything is kept strictly offline on your own device.

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🌟 Specialties of Yaja

• Privacy-First & 100% Local: All journal entries, stats, and language analytics reside strictly on your physical device. Yaja has no cloud databases, tracking SDKs, or remote backup servers. Your thoughts remain yours.
• Standard Markdown Storage: Entries are stored as standard, human-readable .md files organized by year and month. You own your data and can view it in any text editor.
• Actionable Journaling: Instead of segregating notes, tasks, and calendar events, Yaja integrates them. Write inline checklist items [ ] or designate whole entries as native Events right inside your daily logging.
• Extensive Android Integrations: Log thoughts on-the-go with launcher widgets, Home screen shortcuts, and a robust Tasker integration to automate logging from external system events.

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🛠 Key Features

1. Writing Flow & Templates

• Dynamic Templates: Create structured logs using preset templates like Meeting Note, Travel Day, Health Log, Reflection, or Work Log. Templates can be appended, inserted at the cursor, or replace the entire draft.
• Markdown Heading Support: Organise entries with standard markdown headings (e.g., ### Section) which render beautifully in both View and Edit modes.
• Shortcodes: Create custom abbreviations that expand into long snippets, complete with dynamic placeholders like {{today:dd-MMM}} and {{now:HH:mm}}.

2. Actionable Tasks & Events

• Inline Todos: Write tasks directly in entries using standard markdown [ ] and [x].
• Native Events: Mark any entry as an Event to designate family plans, reminders, travel, and appointments.
• Dedicated Todos Screen: Track, filter, and manage open/completed tasks and events without turning your journal into a distracting productivity board.
• Chronological Widgets: Pin your checklist and event list to your Home screen with custom layouts, auto-hide options, and toggle confirmations.

3. Smart Post-Write Review & Revisits

• Post-Write Review Sheet: After saving, a review sheet prompts you to extract todos, detect keywords (people/places), star the day, set a day label, or schedule revisit dates.
• Linked Revisit Dates: Set follow-up reminders (e.g., Tomorrow, Next Week, Next Month, or a custom date). Due revisits surface on your Home timeline and calendar.

4. Deep Insights & Lookbacks

• People & Places Tracking: Detects people and places with aliases and relationship labels. The keywords view shows mention frequencies, co-mentions, and ranked connections.
• On This Day Lookback: Rediscover entries from the same day in past years, view starred highlights, or use Surprise Me to open a random entry.
• Compare Mode Statistics: Visualize writing habits, word count trends, template usage, and keyword deltas.
• Local Script/Language Analytics: Detects dominant scripts/languages in your writing to present in your reviews—completely offline.

5. Advanced Configuration & Security

• Material 3 Theming: Customize your look with dynamic Material 3 colors, custom themes, color intensity, and background tint controls.
• Version History Backups: Automated file versioning keeps safe snapshots of your journal before edits, deletions, or label changes to prevent accidental data loss.
• App Lock: Secure your journal from prying eyes using PIN and fingerprint authentication.

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🚀 Development & Build Instructions

Prerequisites

• Android SDK (API Level 33+)
• JDK 17
• Gradle 8.0+

Building the App

To compile and build the debug APK locally, run:

./gradlew assembleDebug

The resulting APK will be located in app/build/outputs/apk/debug/.

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📥 Importing External Journals

Yaja includes an import utility supporting standard exports from Day One and Journalistic.

Steps to Test Import:

1. Push your JSON export file to the device storage via ADB:

   adb push /path/to/Journal.json /sdcard/Download/Journal.json

2. Open Yaja and navigate to Settings > Data & Storage > Import.
3. Tap the Day One or Journalistic row.
4. Locate and select the file from /sdcard/Download/ using the system file picker.
5. A progress bar will track the import process.
6. Ensure that the active storage location in Settings > Data & Storage > Storage Location has write permissions (via the Storage Access Framework picker) so Yaja can write the imported markdown files.

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💖 Support & Donations

If Yaja helps you keep your personal logs secure and offline, please consider supporting its development:

• Donate / Support via Razorpay

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📄 License

This project is proprietary and maintained by rjwarrier.