Joyful support

It’s asking for a passphrase I’ve forgotten

Joyful doesn’t use a passphrase anymore. If your journal was made on an older version, it asks for that passphrase one time after the update, then never again.

If you’ve forgotten it, we’re sorry, but it can’t be recovered. It was never stored anywhere, so nobody, including us, holds a copy or a reset. Tap “Start a fresh journal” on that screen to begin again.

If you exported a backup and remember that file’s passphrase, start a fresh journal and restore from it in Settings.

Reminders aren’t arriving

Check that notifications are allowed for Joyful in your phone’s system settings, then open the app once. Reminders are booked each time you open the app, so opening it every so often keeps them booked well ahead.

If your phone aggressively restricts background apps, exempt Joyful from battery optimisation.

As a belt-and-braces option, Settings can export your milestones as a calendar file. Those events live in your own calendar and will keep reminding you whatever the app does.

Moving to a new phone

Joyful stores nothing in the cloud, so a new phone starts empty. In Settings, export an encrypted backup from the old device, move the file across however you like, then use “Restore from a backup” on the new one.

Do this before you get rid of the old phone. There’s no other copy.

Bringing in posts from Facebook or Instagram

There are two ways. On Android, anywhere you can tap Share on a post, choose Joyful: the link and caption arrive in a new memory, waiting for you to pick a friend.

On iPhone, and for older material on Android, ask Facebook or Instagram for a download of your information in JSON format, then pick the .zip in Joyful. It’s read entirely on your device, nothing is uploaded, and Joyful shows you the posts that have one of your journal friends tagged in them first, so you are curating rather than importing ten years of status updates.

Meta doesn’t offer apps any way to read your posts directly any more, which is why the export is the route.

The one-time unlock

Joyful is free for three friendships. One payment opens the rest, up to twenty. It’s a single purchase through Google Play or the App Store, not a subscription, and there’s nothing to renew.

Reinstalled, or on a new device with the same Google or Apple account? Open Settings and tap the unlock row. Joyful will restore the purchase without charging you again. If it doesn’t, email us.

Everything you have already written stays yours and stays readable whatever happens to the purchase.

Why only twenty friends?

Because the limit is the feature. Joyful is for the handful of friendships you want to be deliberate about, not for everyone whose number you’ve got. A list of two hundred people is an address book, and your phone already has one of those.