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Tap the green button at the bottom of the home screen and start talking. The first time, iOS asks for permission to use the microphone, which is used only on your iPhone. Tap the button again when you're done and the entry is saved, with a title.

Up to 30 minutes per entry.

Yes. Touch and hold an empty part of your Home Screen, tap Edit, then Add Widget, and choose Ruminate. Tapping it opens Ruminate and starts a recording. If App Lock is on, Ruminate opens to its lock screen instead, so unlock and tap Record. While you record, a Live Activity shows the timer on your Lock Screen.

After you install Ruminate, and again after an app update or an iOS update, its speech model sets itself up for your iPhone. This happens once each time and takes about 10 minutes. Keep Ruminate open, because setup only runs while the app is open. If you tap Record in the meantime, Ruminate shows that it's getting ready and offers Record there as soon as setup finishes. An entry that says Getting ready… gets its words on its own once setup is done.

If your iPhone has a passcode, App Lock turns on when you finish setup. It asks for Face ID or your passcode each time you come back to the app, and covers the screen whenever the app is in the background. To turn it off, open the menu and switch off App Lock. You'll be asked to unlock once more to confirm.

Yes. Open the menu and turn on Daily Reminder, then choose a time. It's off until you turn it on, and it arrives quietly.

On your iPhone, always. Ruminate transcribes with a speech model (Whisper) that ships inside the app. Your audio is never sent anywhere to be transcribed.

That's rare. It happens when the app's speech model couldn't transcribe the recording. Rather than send your audio anywhere, Ruminate keeps the recording. Open the entry and use Re-transcribe to try again.

Ruminate is an English journal, and it works best when other languages are mixed into English speech. Say a phrase in Spanish in the middle of an English entry and it comes out where you said it. Whisper, the speech model inside the app, works with Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, Malay and Vietnamese, which are kept as spoken, and with Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Thai, Greek, Bulgarian and Ukrainian, which come out written in English letters. An entry spoken entirely in another language usually comes back translated into English or wrong, and languages written in their own script aren't supported yet. The app's screens, Clean up and to-dos are in English.

Add it to My Words in Menu › Transcription & My Words, with the ways it gets misheard if you like. Ruminate uses your list to recognise and correct those words in future recordings.

Yes. In Menu › Audio & Storage you can turn off keeping audio for new recordings, or delete all audio while keeping every transcript. For one entry, use the delete-audio option in that entry's actions.

No. What was transcribed is kept exactly as it was. Clean up writes a separate tidied version, and each entry lets you switch between Raw and Polished.

These use Apple Intelligence, which needs iPhone 15 Pro or later with Apple Intelligence turned on in Settings › Apple Intelligence & Siri, in a language it supports. It can take a while to finish setting up after you turn it on. After your free trial, they also need Pro.

Ruminate keeps its own AI features switched off for entries that contain certain words or phrases from a fixed list inside the app. For those entries it won't write a title, clean-up, to-dos or reflections, and Ask leaves them out. It's a rule about what the app's AI writes, not a judgement about you, and nothing about it is recorded or sent anywhere. The entry itself is saved, searchable and playable like any other.

Treat it as a helpful summary, not the record: it can miss things or get them wrong. Ask shows which entries an answer came from, so you can check the original.

No. The model runs on your iPhone, and your journal never leaves it. Nothing you record is used to train anything.

Open the menu, tap Backup & Export, then Export journal. Choose a passphrase of at least 12 characters and tap Encrypt & Export. Then save the file somewhere that isn't only this phone: Files, iCloud Drive, a computer, or a drive. It's free, with or without Pro. Do it regularly, since the backup only has what existed when you made it.

Your entries, sections, reflections, to-dos (with their reminder times), recordings and My Words, all encrypted with your passphrase. Your settings, the name on your menu card and your profile photo aren't included.

Make a backup on your old iPhone and put the file somewhere your new iPhone can reach, such as iCloud Drive or Files. On the new iPhone, install Ruminate, open the menu, tap Backup & Export, then Import from Files, choose the file and enter the passphrase. Choose Merge to add it to what's already there, or Replace to swap this phone's journal for the backup.

Your journal doesn't move over by itself through iCloud or Quick Start, because it's deliberately kept out of iPhone backups.

We're sorry, but that backup can't be opened. The passphrase never leaves your iPhone and there's no recovery key, so nobody, including us, can unlock the file. If you still have the phone with your journal on it, make a new backup with a new passphrase.

On purpose. Keeping it out of iCloud and device backups means it's never copied anywhere you didn't choose. The trade-off is that the encrypted backup you make yourself is your only copy.

Open the entry, tap the ••• button, then Export, and pick PDF, Markdown or plain text. These files aren't encrypted, so keep them somewhere you trust.

Everything is open during the free trial, which you start on the last page of setup. That takes the free trial from the App Store. It costs nothing, never renews and can't be started again by reinstalling. If you skip it, you can start it later from the Pro screen. If the App Store can't be reached, the trial starts with your first entry instead. The app shows when the trial ends and lets you know quietly an hour before. After that, you choose whether to get Pro.

Nothing you've recorded locks. You can still read, play, search, export, back up, restore and delete everything, and tick off your to-dos. New recordings, Clean up, finding to-dos, Ask, reflections, Read Aloud, re-transcription and new sections need Pro.

Open the menu, tap your profile card, then Restore Purchases. It's also on the Pro screen. Make sure you're signed in with the Apple Account you bought Pro with.

On your iPhone, open Settings, tap your name, tap Subscriptions, then Ruminate. You can change plans or tap Cancel Subscription. You can also get there from Ruminate: menu › your profile card › Manage Subscription. Cancelling stops the next renewal, and you keep Pro until the end of the period you've paid for. Deleting the app doesn't cancel a subscription.

Lifetime doesn't cancel a subscription automatically, because only you can do that. Follow the steps above to cancel it, so you aren't charged again.

Apple handles all App Store payments and refunds, so we can't issue one ourselves. Request a refund at reportaproblem.apple.com, signed in with the Apple Account you used.

No. There's no account and no server, and the app never sends your journal anywhere. It exists only on your iPhone, unless you export it yourself. The full details are in our Privacy Policy.

Yes, completely. It goes online only to check your purchase with Apple.

In Menu › Transcription & My Words, tap Share diagnostics… to create a file with crash and hang reports from iOS, and a log of transcription events: timings, word counts, which engine ran and any errors, plus your iOS and app versions. It contains no transcript text. You choose where to send it, and nothing is sent automatically.

Delete the Ruminate app. That removes every entry, recording and setting it stores on your iPhone. App settings such as reminder times may remain in an existing iCloud or computer backup of your iPhone until that backup is replaced. We hold nothing of yours to delete, except emails you've sent us, which we'll delete if you ask.

Only if you set a reminder on a to-do: that reminder shows the to-do's text. To hide notification text on your Lock Screen, go to Settings › Notifications › Show Previews and choose When Unlocked.