Apple iOS 17 could track your mood

A concept render of iOS 17 based on leaked specs

(Image credit: Nicholas Ghigo)

published 25 May 2023

It's not long until June's WWDC 2023, which is when Apple will take the wraps off iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 for the iPhone and iPad respectively. And according to a new report from Bloomberg, the rumoured iPhone mood tracking app is going to be one of the key features we'll see in iOS 17.

The app was previously described in the Wall Street Journal as a kind of journalling app to help you log your days and your moods; it will "analyze the users' behavior to determine what a typical day is like, including how much time is spent at home compared with elsewhere, and whether a certain day included something outside the norm" and will be able to log your call and message histories.

The new report adds a little more detail and I'm even more intrigued now.

What will the iPhone mood tracking app do?

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the app will include "note taking and a stronger social element". That's interesting given previous reports have said that Apple is emphasising privacy around this app: an app that records your deepest darkest thoughts is not necessarily an app you'll be keen to share from. That's what Tumblr's for.

It seems that the journalling app and the mood tracking feature may actually be two separate things, albeit ones designed to work together if you want them to. The journalling app will concentrate on logging what you do, whether that's going places or communicating in various apps, and the mood tracker will log how you felt before, during or after doing it.

I'm really interested in this, because journalling apps are not exactly new: I wrote about the then-new phenomenon of journalling in my very first journalism commission some 25 years ago. So I can't wait to see what innovation Apple thinks it can bring to what is currently a pretty saturated sector.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).