Journaling app takes home top prize, beating out more than 25 other student-made apps
Mobile App Competition Winners
- Overall Winner: Journey
- Best Analytics: Hexbreaker
- Audience Choice Award: Friendability
Keeping a journal is not a strength for some (OK, most) people. Micah Wilson wants to make it easy for those people to chronicle the most important parts of life.
So Wilson, a junior computer science major at Brigham Young University, created an iOS app that allows people to write in their journal every day without ever writing a single word.
Journey, as its called, makes keeping a journal so effortless that it recently landed Wilson the $1650 top prize from the Marriott School of Management’s Mobile App Competition, hosted by the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.
“Journey focuses on the idea that journaling doesn’t have to take a long time,” Wilson said. “You can write (or speak with voice-to-text) an entry in a few seconds.”
The app has a slick interface that makes recording significant events smooth—just a few taps and you’re done. Users can post a quick note, file away a photo or audio recording and even clip a song they really love to their online journal, or “Journey.”
For those who struggle to come up with something to write in their journal, the app includes journal prompts, such as “Who made you feel good this week?” Or “If you could live anywhere you wanted, where would you live?”
Coolest of all, the app has an export function that allows you to save all your content as a PDF so it can be printed into a hard copy journal. "Journey" originally launched as a free app and is now priced at $1.99.
“I felt very strong about the export option—if there is no way to export your app, then your journal dies with your phone,” Wilson said. “What if a user continues to use the app for years and then iOs or even iCloud doesn’t exist any longer? That would be really frustrating to lose all those memories you’ve saved.”
Journey beat out more than 25 other student-made mobile apps (with everything from games to social media apps) to win the BYU Mobile App Competition.
Other top finishers included the game Hexbreaker, which won $1600 as tops in the analytics category, along with Curo, and Flip. Friendability, an app that helps you find compatible friends across social networks, won the audience choice award and $1200.
