Period tracker with a journal: notes, moods and your cycle

Short answer: a period tracker with a journal lets you write on the day itself, so your words sit next to where you were in your cycle. Dew works this way. Every day is a page (moods, symptoms, a note, a picture, a minute of voice), and the Journal tab lays those pages over your cycle, with fertile days marked in gold. You can find days by a part of your cycle, a feeling or a word, and turn them into a record for your doctor. It all stays on your iPhone and in your own private iCloud. For longer writing there’s Moss, a journal app from the same makers that connects to Dew on your phone.

I build both, so weigh what follows with that in mind. Everything I describe below is in the app today.

Why keep notes next to your cycle days?

Because memory is a bad record of a month. Ask anyone how they felt three weeks ago and you’ll get the last few days, rounded. Patterns that repeat every cycle are hard to see from inside one: the tired week, the short temper two days before, the night you sleep badly every month and blame on work.

Written on the day, a few words add up to things you can actually check:

• Mood. Do your low days come before your period, or are they spread through the month? Those are different stories.
• Sleep and energy. Short nights and flat days are easy to log, and easy to forget.
• Pain. How many days it hurt, how badly, and what helped. This is exactly what a doctor asks, and exactly what’s hard to answer from memory.

Doctors who look at premenstrual symptoms ask for this kind of record, kept day by day and looked at later, because it is more reliable than recall. A period tracker that lets you write turns your cycle into something you can read back.

What to look for in a period tracker with notes

1. Notes that belong to a day, not a separate notebook you have to match up by hand.
2. Quick taps and real words. Tapping a mood takes a second; a sentence says what the tap can’t. You want both.
3. A way to find things again. Search by word, and by part of the cycle: “show me every day I wrote about headaches” and “show me my fertile days” are both questions you’ll ask.
4. Something to take to a doctor that counts what you logged without turning it into a diagnosis.
5. Privacy for the text. A diary says far more than a list of dates. Where it’s stored and who can read it matters more for notes than for anything else in the app.

How Dew’s Journal works

Every day is a page

Each day in Dew holds what you logged: your period, your moods and symptoms, what helped, words of your own, and a note. Since 1.1.6 a day can also hold a picture and a minute of your voice, “taped in like a scrapbook.” You can mark a strong pain day by tapping cramps twice. The evening page is where most of this gets written, a few calm questions at the end of the day.

Your cycle, drawn on the month

The Journal tab shows the month with your cycle on it: your period as you logged it, your fertile days marked in gold, and your estimated ovulation day with a small gold dot (a thermometer when your temperature confirmed it). From 1.4.3 the fertile days are shaded too: the deeper the gold, the likelier that day. These are the same days Today uses, so the Journal and the rest of Dew never disagree about where you are. If you’re new to the window itself, see what the fertile window is.

Find days by cycle part, feeling or word

Since 1.4.1, a filter beside the Journal’s search opens Show me days with. Pick a part of your cycle (period, fertile, ovulation), what’s on the day (a note, a picture, a voice note), one of the words you log most, or type any word you’ve logged, your own included. The month answers straight away: matching days get a ring, the rest fade, and the count sits at the bottom. Arrows jump to the next month with a match.

One pick at a time is free for everyone. Combining two or more (cramps and your period, or headache or poor sleep) is part of Garden, Dew’s paid tier.

Search what you wrote

Find a day looks through your own notes, and the moods and symptoms you tapped, so days you never wrote on are findable too. Capitals and accents don’t matter. Type a part of your cycle, like “ovulation” or “fertile”, and you get those stretches as rows. You can also show only the days with a photo, or only the days with a recording. It’s free, and it runs on your phone.

The book of you

The book of you is a few short pages about your cycles, written by Dew from your own days: when your period tends to come, your heaviest day, the symptom you log most in the three days before your period, your nights before it, and how your energy follows your sleep.

It is deliberately slow. A page is written in ink only once its pattern has held in at least three cycles, and in most of the cycles that could show it. Before that, it’s a pencil page that says plainly it’s still listening. If your cycles vary a lot, it says so (“your cycles have run from 24 to 39 days”) rather than inventing a rhythm. And when something people expect turns out not to follow your cycle, it can say that too. The cover and the first pages are free; the rest open with Garden, and any page written while you had Garden stays yours to read.

A record for your doctor

A record of your pain days is one page a doctor can read in a minute. It counts how long your cycles ran, how many strong pain days each one had, what stopped the pain, and what you tried on those days, in your own words. Nothing is interpreted: the page says “No conclusions are drawn.” Your notes are off this page until you tick them (that part is Garden), and a private evening you sealed never reaches it. There’s also a broader summary for your doctor, and a premenstrual journal with a gentle daily rating, for anyone asked to keep a record of how hard days follow the cycle.

How private is a period diary?

A date says you had a period. A diary says how you felt about your partner that week, what you were afraid of, what your body did. If you’re going to write, the storage question matters more, not less.

Here is where your words go in Dew:

• Nowhere but your devices. Your notes live on your iPhone and, if you turn on sync, in your own end-to-end encrypted iCloud. There is no Dew account and no Dew server, so there is no copy for me to read, sell, lose in a breach or hand over. See how private iCloud sync works.
• Search runs on the phone. Finding a word reads your days where they already are. Dew’s anonymous usage counts, which you can turn off, never carry a word you wrote, and Find days sends none at all.
• Private evenings can be sealed. An evening’s private page can be kept behind Face ID or your passcode, even while the app is open. A sealed day shows only an envelope in the Journal, and its words stay out of search, Find days and the doctor’s record.
• The app can be locked, and can open empty. App Lock keeps Dew behind Face ID, and a decoy passcode opens a Dew with no diary in it at all. Both are covered in period tracker with a passcode lock.

If you’re comparing apps, ask the same question of each: is the note text kept on the company’s servers? For Flo, Clue and most cloud-based trackers, your entries are stored on their servers with their keys. There’s more in is Flo safe?

For longer writing: Moss

Some days want a whole page, not a line. For those, we made Moss, a private journal for iPhone from the same small studio. Like Dew, it has no account and no server: your pages stay on your phone and in your own iCloud. A page can hold words, photos, video, stickers and voice, and voice notes are transcribed on the iPhone, never on a server. Moss can lock with Face ID or a code of its own.

If you have both, they connect on the phone itself. Under Save on Dew’s log page, Continue in Moss opens that day in Moss, starting from your note. Once connected, your Moss pages sit beside your days in Dew’s Journal, and Moss can show where you were in your cycle on each page. What crosses (your cycle day and phase, your moods, rest, the evening note, photos and voice) can each be switched off in Settings › Moss. Nothing goes over the internet: the two apps meet in a shared folder on your iPhone, and each only writes its own.

The short version

• You want a line or two on each day, next to your cycle: Dew’s evening page and Journal.
• You want to find your patterns: Find days and search, then the book of you once three cycles have passed.
• You’re seeing a doctor: the record of your pain days.
• You want to write pages, not lines: Moss, connected to Dew on your phone.

Logging your period, moods and symptoms in Dew is free. Some deeper parts of the Journal are in Garden, and you can try it before you pay. Whatever you choose, keep your words somewhere only you can read them. That’s what a private period tracker is for.