The Last 5 Years
A journal that writes itself.
Every other journaling app hands you a blank page and asks you to fill it, every day, forever. The Last 5 Years does the opposite. It never asks you to write a single word.
Once a week, it reviews your own photo library, step count, music, and weather, then replays the life you already lived: this same week, one, two, three, four, and five years ago.
You’re No Longer the Writer. You’re the Reader.
Traditional journaling apps share three quiet flaws. The blank page is discouraging, and one missed day snowballs into abandonment. They demand daily work, turning your own memories into a chore. And they hold years of your entries on someone else’s servers, one shutdown or price hike away from vanishing.
The Last 5 Years solves all three at once. It starts full, because you’ve already spent years filling it every time you took a photo. It requires zero input. And your data never leaves your own device and iCloud.
What a week looks like
- It finds the week’s best photos. Favorites, faces, portraits, and trips win. The parking-receipt screenshot loses. Rich weeks become a swipeable set, sometimes with a short silent video as the finale.
- It reads the texture of the week. Steps, workouts, weather, and even the songs you were playing add color. Your longest run of the year becomes a milestone, not a number.
- It writes the caption. Everything becomes a short, warm line. Never a spreadsheet readout, always a small story.
- It keeps every entry. Past weeks live on a shelf, replayable exactly as they were written. Over time, the app becomes the journal you never had to keep.
- One-tap sharing. Any card becomes a postcard you can send to the friend who was in the photo.
Your data never leaves your iCloud
Photos, health data, and music are read on your device and stay there. What the app saves syncs only through your private iCloud; there is no separate account or server. The app also has no subscription or paywall, because your memories were never anywhere but yours to begin with.
The Book Behind the App
Built by Chris Weiss, who is also writing The Last Bites.
There’s a scene in the novel where Ella needs to know who sat in her dining room on one specific night years ago, and the only thing that can tell her is the restaurant’s old reservation book, a dumb paper record nobody kept for any reason except habit. It turns out to be the most important document in her life.
That’s what this app is. A reservation book for your own weeks, kept automatically, by accident, for no reason at all, until the day you need to know exactly what you were doing, and it’s the only thing that remembers.
Nobody keeps the record on purpose. That’s why it’s honest. Read the first three chapters.