YoreExplore the appFor a few years I ran five different tracking systems for the same underlying habit: Letterboxd for movies, Goodreads for books, Backloggd for games, a podcast app's built-in history for podcasts, and a spreadsheet for everything that didn't fit (board games, manga, comics). Each one had its own account, its own login, its own idea of what "finished" meant. None of them talked to each other, and none of them let me write a note about why I dropped something halfway through. I built Yore to collapse that into one private, local-first app.
The problem with five different tracking apps
Splitting media tracking across category-specific apps means splitting your memory across category-specific apps too. If I want to know everything I consumed during a specific month (the show I was watching, the book I was reading, the album on repeat), that information doesn't exist anywhere as a single timeline unless I go collect it manually from five places. Each app also tends to push you toward its own social layer: follow lists, public reviews, algorithmic recommendations. I didn't want any of that. I wanted a private, personal record that covered everything I consumed, not a different silo per format.
Yore tracks movies, TV, anime, books, manga, games, music, podcasts, board games, and comics in a single library, with a single data model underneath all of them.
The data model: items, logs, and diary entries
Everything in Yore boils down to three things. An item is the thing itself: the movie, the book, the album. A log is a timestamped record of what you did with it: started it, finished it, dropped it, rated it. And a diary entry is a dated note, optionally linked to an item or a specific log, for whatever reaction doesn't fit into a star rating.
Separating items from logs turned out to be the most important design decision. Most tracking apps collapse an item down to a single status field ("watched," "reading," "completed"), which works until you rewatch something, or reread a book years later with a different reaction. In Yore, a rewatch is just another log against the same item, so the item accumulates a real history instead of a single overwritten state. You can see that you watched a show in 2022 and rated it a 7, then rewatched it in 2026 and rated it a 9, and both of those are true at once.
Local SQLite storage, and open metadata with no API keys
Yore's library lives in a local SQLite database on the device. There's no account required, and no backend that has to be up for the app to work. It's fully offline-capable by design. Optional iCloud sync is available for people who want their library to follow them across devices, but it's not required for the core experience.
Adding items manually is always available, but for speed, Yore can pull metadata from public sources: TVmaze for TV, Jikan for anime, Open Library for books, iTunes for music and podcasts, Wikidata as a general fallback. None of these require the user to sign up for a developer account or paste in an API key. That kind of setup step is exactly what leaves similar apps unusable until you've gone and generated your own TMDB or IGDB key first. The metadata that comes back becomes part of your local library immediately; there's no ongoing dependency on the source staying available.
Why Yore has no social feed
The apps I moved away from often push you toward performance. Activity shows up for friends, reviews attract attention, and leaderboards make more logging look like the point. None of that helps me remember what I did or how I felt about it. Yore is a library and diary for my own use. It has no social feed, public profile, or recommendation engine, because I wanted a private record rather than another place to perform for an audience.
A free library covers up to five items, enough to try the real workflow. A one-time Full Access purchase removes the limit. I wasn't going to build a local-first, no-account app and then ask people to pay for it every month.