I started asking one question a few years ago: why is it so hard to hold on to the good things?
Not the big ones — those stay. It's the small ones that slip. The restaurant where everything was right. The book that changed how I thought about something for a few months. The conversation on a walk. The evening that, at the time, felt like exactly the kind of evening I wanted more of.
By the time I tried to remember any of them precisely, they were mostly gone. The emotional residue was still there — that was a good period — but the details had dissolved.
That question led me, slowly, to this project.
The research habit
I started reading about memory. How it actually works, not how we assume it works. About the hippocampus and place cells. About James Pennebaker's work on expressive writing. About why spatial context makes memories stickier. About why writing something down the same evening preserves it in a way that writing it a week later doesn't.
Most of what I found was scattered across academic papers and the occasional good book. There wasn't a place that pulled it together in a readable way — the science, the practical methods, the honest personal experience of trying to apply them.
So I started writing about it. For myself at first, then as a habit, then as something I wanted to share.
The Journal, Places, and Activities sections of this site are that habit made public: notes on what I've learned, how I try to apply it, and what the research actually says — as opposed to what the wellness industry claims it says.
The app
While I was doing this research, I kept running into the same problem in practice.
I journal. I track places. I log activities. These three things kept bumping into each other — a journal entry that was really about a place, a place that was really about what I was doing there, an activity that deserved a note and a location.
I looked for an app that combined them. On a map, preferably, because spatial context is the whole point. I didn't find one that worked the way I wanted.
So I built it.
Remember is an iOS app built with SwiftUI, SwiftData, and MapKit. It's offline-first — everything lives on your device and syncs via iCloud if you have it enabled. There's no account, no tracking, no subscription. You pay once (€4.99) or use it free up to 100 entries, and that's the entire transaction.
- SwiftUI
- SwiftData
- MapKit
- iCloud sync
- Offline-first
- No account
- No subscription
It took longer than I expected. Building something solo always does. But the result is the app I actually wanted to use, which is a good enough reason to have built it.
What this project is — and isn't
This is not a startup. There's no growth target, no investor, no roadmap driven by anyone's OKRs but my own curiosity.
It's a personal project that got serious. A small studio from the Bavarian Alps, trying to answer a question that turned out to have a lot of interesting depth.
The knowledge hub is free to read, and always will be. The app is cheap on purpose. I'm not trying to build a business that extracts maximum value from people who want to remember their lives — that would be a strange way to approach the subject.
What I want, if I want anything beyond the project itself, is for someone to read something here and think: yes, that's the thing I couldn't quite name. Or to use the app and find that it fits.
That's enough.
A note on privacy
We keep this project somewhat separate from our day-to-day lives — you'll find us here as RememberApps Studio rather than under individual names attached to social profiles. It's not a secret — just a preference for keeping personal work personal.
If you want to get in touch, support@remember-journal.com is the right address. I read everything, and I reply to most of it.