Sotto

The AI journal that never reads your journal.

Now on the App Store for iPhone and iPad

What Sotto is

Most AI journals send their users' most private sentences to someone else's server. Sotto never does. Every reflection, every letter, every answer is written on the user's iPhone by Apple's on-device intelligence - in airplane mode, if they like. There is no account because there is nothing to sign into, and no server because there is nothing to send. The App Privacy label reads, in full: Data Not Collected.

After each entry, Sotto writes a short reflection that notices what mattered. Every Sunday it writes the author a letter about their week; every month, a retrospective. Mood Insights charts the shape of their moods over time, and Ask answers questions like "when did I last see the maples?" from their own entries, with the entries to show for it.

Sotto launched with iOS 27 as, we believe, the first fully agentic journal: the complete journal schema is published through App Intents, so Siri can capture a thought, find an entry, or amend one hands-free, and entries join Spotlight's semantic index. Weekly letters are pre-written on-device by a background task and announced with a local notification that never contains a word the user wrote.

Sotto 1.1, live since launch, brings the journal to iPad: the journal, letters, and Ask open beside their lists on the wide screen, and every page keeps a book's measure. It is the same app, the same privacy label, and the same on-device model.

Fact sheet

Developer	Cedarlight Studios LLC, a one-person studio in Wisconsin
Platform	iPhone and iPad (version 1.1: journal and letters open side by side, and every page keeps a book's measure). AI features run on-device with Apple Intelligence.
Price	Free to journal, forever. Sotto Plus (weekly letters, retrospectives, Insights, Ask): $4.99/month or $29.99/year with a 7-day free trial.
Privacy	Data Not Collected. No accounts, no analytics, no third-party AI, no servers. All AI inference on-device via the Foundation Models framework.
Accessibility	VoiceOver-first: every control labeled, charts carry Audio Graph descriptors, moods are encoded by symbol shape rather than color, full Dynamic Type, Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency honored.
Apple technologies	Foundation Models, App Intents with assistant schemas, Spotlight semantic indexing, SwiftUI, Swift 6 strict concurrency, StoreKit 2, Swift Charts, Face ID, BackgroundTasks.
Availability	On the App Store (version 1.1, iPhone and iPad), launched alongside iOS 27.
Social	@cedarlight.io on Bluesky, @cedarlight_wi on X (studio accounts; launch posts go there)
Contact	press@cedarlight.io

Key art

A quiet writing desk beside a tall window in soft morning light: cream letter paper and a fountain pen, a sprig of sage in a glass of water, and a folded cream letter

Screenshots

Store frame: a weekly letter on its stationery sheet, headline 'A letter from your week.' — The weekly letter, on its own stationery

Store frame: a journal entry with its short AI reflection, headline 'It notices what mattered.' — A reflection after each entry

Store frame: the Ask tab answering questions from the user's own entries, headline 'Ask your journal.' — Ask, answered from your own entries

Store frame: the compose screen with the trust line 'Stays on your iPhone.', headline 'Nothing leaves your phone.' — Private by architecture, not by promise

Store frame: Mood Insights charts, headline 'The shape of your moods.' — Mood Insights, computed on-device

Store frame: Siri voice capture onboarding, headline 'Journal without opening the app.' — Siri capture: journal without opening the app

Screenshots, iPad (1.1)

iPad store frame: the letters list beside a weekly letter on its stationery sheet, headline 'A letter from your week.' — The weekly letter beside its list

iPad store frame: the Ask view answering a question from the user's own entries, headline 'Ask your journal.' — Ask, at a book's measure

iPad store frame: Mood Insights charts on the wide screen, headline 'The shape of your moods.' — Mood Insights on iPad

Downloads

Key art, 1920×1080 JPEG
App icon, 1024×1024 PNG
Screenshots, iPhone and iPad: right-click any image above, or request the full sets by email.

About Cedarlight Studios

Cedarlight Studios is Joseph Kollman, building independent software in Wisconsin. Every Cedarlight app shares one architecture: private, on-device, no accounts. Sotto is the flagship: the app that proves a thoughtful AI product does not need to read its users' lives off a server to be one.

Press inquiries, review builds, and interview requests: press@cedarlight.io. Replies come from the person who wrote the code.