Here is a strange thing to admit about the app I just launched: I don't know how you're using it.
I know a few numbers Apple hands me, because Apple runs the store and counts the sales — how many people bought Kodama, roughly where they are, whether today was busier than yesterday. Those are the store's numbers, the same ones any shop gets from its till. I'm grateful for them and I read them every morning like everyone else.
But past the sale, the trail goes cold on purpose. I can't see what word you wrote today. I can't see whether you opened the app this morning or haven't in a week. I don't know your most common word, your quietest month, whether you use the Grove or never scroll back. There's no dashboard in the back office with your name on a row, because the app was built so that row was never created. The words live on your phone and stay there. I designed myself out of the loop.
Every instinct in software says this is a mistake. You're supposed to instrument everything — measure the funnel, watch where people drop off, run the experiment, tune the numbers up. That's not a conspiracy, it's mostly how good products get better. When someone abandons Kodama at the third screen, I will genuinely never know it happened, and I can't A/B my way out of it. I gave up a real tool.
I keep deciding it's worth it, and here's the honest reason. The whole promise of this app is that your words are yours — not held, not read, not counted. The moment I install the machinery to watch you use it "just for product insights," that promise has a hole in it, and holes in promises don't stay small. You can't half-collect data. Either there's a pipe out of your phone or there isn't, and I'd rather build the version where there isn't and fly a little blind than build the version where I can see everything and ask you to trust that I'm looking away.
So how do you improve a thing you can't watch? The old way, it turns out. I use my own app every day and notice what annoys me. I read every email that comes to support, and a real person's one sentence about what confused them is worth more than a heatmap anyway. When the app crashes it sends an anonymous stack trace, scrubbed of anything you typed, so I can fix the bug without learning the person. It's slower. It's more like tending something than optimizing it. That feels right for a journal.
There's a version of me in a year who wishes he had the numbers, when I'm trying to figure out why growth stalled and I have nothing but a hunch and an inbox. I've made peace with him. He gets to keep the promise intact, and the promise is the product.
I can't see your words. That's the entire point.
Kodama is a one-word journal for iPhone — US$7.99 once, no subscription, no account, no ads. Your words never leave your phone. Get it on the App Store.