Last updated 30 September 2026
Depth Ecology is a journal for noticing what moves through you — dreams, sensations, thoughts, feelings, impressions and impulses — and for drawing out the symbols that recur across them. It runs entirely on your phone: no account, no sign-in, and nothing sent to us. If something is not working, or you are stuck, write to us.
Email contact@personalis.io and describe what happened and what you expected instead. Telling us your phone model, and its iOS or Android version, helps. We aim to reply within a few working days.
No. There is no sign-up, no login and no password, and we never learn who you are. Depth Ecology is a subscription, and your subscription — through the App Store on an iPhone, or Google Play on Android — is the only thing standing between you and the app. The store handles it, and we never see your Apple ID or your Google account.
There is a monthly tier and an annual one; the current prices are shown in the app, because the store sets them for your country and currency. New subscribers start with a one-week free trial. You can cancel at any time — on an iPhone in Settings › Apple ID › Subscriptions, on Android in Google Play › Payments & subscriptions › Subscriptions — and cancelling stops the next renewal rather than ending the period you have already paid for.
If your subscription ends, your journal stays yours. Everything you have written remains on the phone and remains readable — you can still open entries, browse the timeline, look at symbols and export a PDF. Only writing new entries and editing existing ones stops until you renew. We do not lock people out of their own writing.
Tap Restore purchases, on the subscription screen or in Settings inside the app. That asks the store to re-check what the account signed in on the phone is entitled to — the Apple ID on an iPhone, the Google account in Google Play on Android — which is also how a second device picks up a subscription bought on the first. If it still does not find one, check that the phone is signed in to the same account you subscribed with.
On an iPhone, yes — to your own iCloud. The app saves a copy in the background whenever something has changed — you do not have to remember to do it — and you can also save one on demand from Settings inside the app, which shows when the last backup was written.
It goes to your iCloud account, not to us: we run no server, so there is no copy of your journal anywhere we could reach. That also means we cannot recover it for you if you delete it. Install the app on a new iPhone signed in to the same Apple ID and it will offer to bring your journal back.
Backing up does not stop if your subscription ends. We are not willing to let anyone lose a journal over a billing failure, so the backup keeps running whatever your subscription is doing. What a subscription is needed for is bringing the journal back onto a new phone — and if you have ever subscribed, you keep that too, even after the subscription ends. Only someone who has never subscribed is asked to before restoring.
One caveat worth knowing: the backup needs iCloud Drive switched on and enough space in your iCloud account; if the app says it cannot reach iCloud, that is usually why.
On Android, not yet: there is no backup on Android. Your journal is kept only on the phone you write it on, and Android's own backup and phone-to-phone transfer do not include it. Losing or replacing the phone loses the journal, and we cannot recover it, because we never had a copy.
On either phone, exporting a PDF from Journal output now and then is a good habit.
Nothing you write is sent to us — there is no account to log in to and no server of ours holding a copy, so there is nothing for us to read. On an iPhone the backup goes to your own iCloud account, where it is protected the way the rest of your iCloud data is; it is written to the app's private area, so it does not turn up in the Files app next to your other documents.
On the phone itself, your entries sit in the app's private storage — protected by iOS Data Protection on an iPhone, and by Android's storage encryption on Android. Both come from your passcode or screen lock, so please set one; someone holding your unlocked phone can open the app and read your journal, exactly as they could read your notes or messages.
Dictation runs entirely on your device unless you switch on Online dictation in the app's Settings, so by default nothing you speak is sent away for transcription. That needs a speech model for your language on the phone:
Until the model is there, we disable on-device dictation rather than quietly fall back to sending your voice to a server. If you would rather have the phone's online service do it, switch on Online dictation — the app will tell you where your speech goes before it does.
Open Journal output, choose a date range, and export a PDF. It is produced on your device and shared only if you send it.
On Android, delete the app. That removes the journal, and there is no copy anywhere else — no backup, and no account to close.
On an iPhone it is two steps, because the backup deliberately outlives the app — that is what lets you reinstall and get your writing back.
See the privacy policy — the short version is that we collect nothing at all.