VaultMind — a private AI journal app with an AI coach that runs on your phone
Write it down in whatever order it comes out. An on-device model does the tidying, the key never leaves your phone's secure hardware, and nothing is ever uploaded.
Journalling advice assumes a mind that works in order
Conventional journalling assumes you sit down, think in sequence, and produce a paragraph. That is not how a lot of people's minds work, and it is specifically not how an ADHD brain works — thoughts arrive out of order, in fragments, at inconvenient moments, and the effort of organising them into prose is exactly the effort that stops the entry being written at all.
VaultMind is built around the dump. Write the fragments. An on-device model organises them afterwards, pulls out what you actually did, and produces a short summary. The structure comes from the software rather than from you.
What is inside the private AI journal
Four areas: writing, understanding, coaching, and keeping it safe.
- Brain-dump organising. Unstructured text goes in; the on-device model groups and orders it. There is also an activity extractor that identifies what you did, and a TLDR extractor that condenses a long entry into something you will actually reread.
- Voice entry, polished. Speak an entry and a voice polisher cleans up the transcript, which matters because dictated text is full of restarts and fillers that make an entry unpleasant to revisit.
- Mood and emotion tracking. Each entry carries a mood, with emotion chips for finer grain. The Insights screen turns that into something readable: average mood, total entries, best streak, most common emotion, and which days of the week consistently go best or worst.
- An AI coach. A coaching conversation grounded in your own entries, with a daily allowance on the free tier of two sessions per day.
- Achievements and streaks. Optional, and switchable off — streak pressure helps some people and actively harms others, so the streak counter is a toggle rather than a fixture.
- A privacy centre. One screen that states what the app does with your data, including a line confirming there are no third-party SDKs beyond the ones you can see. There is also a clinician mode and an option to recommend the app to a therapist, for people using a journal as part of actual treatment.
- Export and backup. PDF export for taking entries to an appointment, and an optional encrypted Google Drive backup if you want a copy off the device.
Encryption that is real, and local AI
Entries are encrypted with AES-256, and the key is held in the platform's hardware-backed secure store — Android KeyStore or the iOS Keychain — rather than in the app's own files. The database is encrypted at rest with that key, and exports use it too. If someone takes the phone, the journal is not readable by copying files off it.
The AI is equally local. The model is selected by tier based on detected device RAM and downloaded once, then runs on the phone. A journal is close to the most sensitive text a person produces, and the correct number of servers to send it to is zero.
Who it is for
The named audience is ADHD, and the design decisions follow from it: no penalty for irregular use, no rigid prompt structure, an optional streak, and organisation done by the software rather than demanded of the user.
Beyond that, it suits anyone in therapy who has been asked to keep a journal and wants to bring something legible to a session — PDF export and clinician mode exist for exactly that. And it suits people who want to journal but have never been comfortable putting their inner life into a cloud account.
Privacy and storage
Entries live in an encrypted local database with the key in hardware-backed secure storage. AI inference runs on the device. The only routine network use is the one-time model download and the purchase SDK; Google Drive backup is opt-in and encrypted before it leaves.
VaultMind is a self-reflection tool, not a medical device or a treatment. It does not diagnose anything, and its coach is not a therapist. The app is free with an optional Pro purchase.
Frequently asked questions
How is my journal protected? Entries are encrypted with AES-256, and the key lives in Android KeyStore or the iOS Keychain rather than in the app's own files — so copying the database off the device does not produce readable text.
Does the AI send my entries anywhere? No. The model is downloaded once during setup and runs on the phone; all inference is local.
What does the brain-dump organiser actually do? You write in whatever order things arrive, and the model groups and orders the text, extracts the activities you mentioned, and can condense a long entry into a short summary.
Can I get my entries out? Yes. PDF export produces a document you can keep or bring to an appointment, and there is an optional encrypted Google Drive backup.
Is the streak counter compulsory? No — it can be switched off in Settings. Streak pressure helps some people and works against others.