Best Journaling Apps, iOS 26 Support, Video Updates

It’s been a busy year behind the scenes, evolving Happyfeed into the best journaling app for anyone looking for a simple, joyful habit. Most of the recent improvements have been small changes to speed up the apps, boost reliability, and adapt to the latest design systems, including iOS 26. Our last big feature was the Shared Memories widget and we have some major updates for Pods in the works - testing out some new mechanics for group sharing.

To keep you up-to-date on the latest at Happyfeed, I’ll dive into a few updates from recent months.

“Best Journaling Apps” for iOS

For the past 18 weeks, Happyfeed has been featured in a list of the “Best Journaling Apps” for both iPhone and iPad in the App Store. Ranking #1 for iPad and #11 for iPhone. It’s an incredibly delightful achievement to appear in a list like this – showing that Apple recognizes the hard work that goes into running and improving Happyfeed year after year.

What does this mean as a user of Happyfeed? Hopefully it’s a nice piece of validation for an app you already love. Maybe it’s an extra thing to mention if you’re recommending Happyfeed to a friend or starting a new Pod. For anyone new to the app, I hope it’s a sign that we’re in this for the long-haul: absolutely determined to be the best journaling app we can be.

That doesn’t mean the app is for everyone though! Happyfeed is purposely opinionated about keeping memories brief and leaning in on gratitude and positivity. Over time, it ensures that you have a lightweight habit and source of happy memories from your past. Something to grow with.

iOS 26 Support and Liquid Glass

Every year we update Happyfeed for the latest iOS version, and this year was especially fun because of the updates to the overall design system including Liquid Glass. Liquid Glass introduces design elements that move in fluid ways, refract light similarly to droplets of water, and add more depth to flat designs.

The main screen in our app already had a “glass pane” feel so a few small changes went a long way toward making Happyfeed feel native to iOS 26. Much of this was achieved by using standard components like the tab bar and alerts. The real work came from minor tweaks to layouts like moving content behind the navigation to really show off the new design.

The result feels fresh but without a full redesign. Of course, there’s always more work to be done to best adhere to the Apple design guidelines. We’ll be keeping these in mind as we continue to add features this year.

Video Journal Improvements on Android

I’m also excited to announce a wide range of improvements to video journaling on the Android version of Happyfeed. We introduced video support over a year ago but it’s been in need of some fixes and optimizations. Especially for people adding daily videos like a diary, Happyfeed was falling short.

There’s certainly room to make it even better, but here’s a list of some of the updates that we’ve made over the past couple of months:

• ⚡️ Faster video uploading speed - There was a LOT of work to do here. From figuring out the best ways to stream data to finding the best ways to break a video into chunks. Even longer videos only take a few seconds now.
• ⚡️ Faster video cropping speed - Video trimming was using a generic tool on a default setting. Now the app uses the most optimized settings based on the format of the video.
• 🌄 Fixed video orientation bug - One tiny typo in code caused photos in a specific orientation to display improperly after uploading. They looked fine after a refresh but it was annoying!
• ⭐️ Reduced crashes from editing and uploading - Editing and uploading were previously very prone to crashes. Typically from memory errors, so we improved the way we hold on to data as it’s uploaded and reformatted.
• ✨ Better memory management - Viewing a list of text on an Android device is no problem, even photos aren’t too challenging, but a list of videos comes with new challenges. There’s a lot of data to load as you scroll and it’s important to only load what’s visible or ready to play.

If you’re on Android and notice room for further improvement, please reach out! Feedback, especially video features, comes in more slowly and it wasn’t obvious sooner how badly these fixes were needed.

Wrapping up the Year

Hard to believe there’s less than two months until 2026. The rest of the year will be devoted to building, testing, and experimenting with a new way to share in Pods. We’ll start with beta users (email me if you’re interested) and aim to release around the new year. Most of the updates are aimed at making it easier to share and create more incentive to keep the habit going – perfect for gratitude resolutions for 2026.