A private diary for one child.

Photographs, video, voice notes and small written moments — captured in seconds, kept for a very long time, and shared with nobody but the family you invite.

What it is

Dane opens on four buttons and nothing else. Tap one and you are capturing: a photograph, a video, a voice note, or a line of text. Every entry is stamped with the date, the place and the child's age on that day, worked out automatically, so a note written in a hurry is still legible in twenty years.

Two things it is built around

• Capturing is never slower than the moment. The camera is warm before you reach it, and capture is never blocked by a network, a sync, a permission or an account.
• The archive outlives the app. Every capture is written as an ordinary file to your iCloud Drive — arranged by year and month, alongside a plain-text record of each entry — before it is written to the app's own database. Open the folder in Files or Finder and everything is there, readable, with no app and no developer required.

Who can see it

Only people you invite, individually, by email or phone number. There is no public link, no discoverable profile and no account to be found. Everything lives in your own iCloud.

The developer of Dane cannot see any of it, and there is no mechanism by which he could — the app talks to Apple's services on your behalf and to nothing else. Read the privacy policy.

Getting it

Dane is an unlisted app: it does not appear in App Store searches and is installed only from a direct link. If someone has invited you to their diary, they will send you that link along with the invitation itself.

Made by Andrew Ranley. Questions: support@dane42.com