I launched Little Memory in 2011 as a Rails app, with the iOS app following in 2012. You write one line about your day, and a year later it comes back to you. Everyone's entries lived in my database, which always made me feel uneasy: if something ever happened to me, someone else would have to keep the servers running just so people could keep using their own diaries. Over the years, people have written over 1 million memories in it.

2.0 is a full rewrite, and it's offline-first. Entries live on the phone (with iCloud sync). You can write in your diary without an account, and your private and personal data stays in your control and in your phone rather than on my servers. It's iOS only, free to download, with a premium upgrade (lifetime/subscription).

The import/migration took the biggest chunk of the project. Many long-time users have thousands of entries. I used to let people add entries via SMS, and running the importer during the TestFlight beta turned up a bug from that: Twilio split long messages into separate webhooks with no shared message ID, and they didn't always arrive in order, so an app designed around one entry per day had been writing two on a single day. The beta found a concurrency bug that silently failed to attach photos, and some people had thousands of photos to import, so I set up background tasks since no one's keeping the app open for long periods of time.

I wrote more about the rewrite here: https://ivanthinking.net/2026/09/22/little-memory-2.0-moving...

Thanks for reading, and I hope you try it out. I'd love to hear any feedback you have.

Ivan

ivan@thelittlememory.com