Dotted vs Trace by Aura
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Dotted
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Dotted is a calm, private habit notebook. One small dot a day, paper-textured pages, and quiet progress — instead of charts, badges, and noise. Keep your habits in one place. Mark the day with a dot. Add a note. Log a mood. Then close the app. QUIET BY DEFAULT Soft terracotta and paper. No streaks shouting at you, no leaderboards, no accounts to create. Dotted does not collect your habits. ONE DOT A DAY Tap to mark the day. The grid fills slowly. The app never tells you to do more. DAILY TASKS A quiet to-do list lives next to today's dots. Add a small task, check it off, or carry it to tomorrow. You can also keep a shared task with the person in your Shared Ritual. DAILY NOTE & MOOD Capture a single line. Pick a mood. Look back through the year on a paper-textured calendar. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Dotted has no accounts and no servers we own. Your habits, dots, notes, and moods stay on your device and sync only through your own iCloud. REVIEW AT YOUR PACE Browse the week, the month, or the year. See gentle stats — no shame, no graphs that pretend to know you. SHARED RITUALS Keep one small ritual together with someone you trust — like a daily walk, a stretch, or a check-in. Both tap a dot for the day; the ritual stays in sync between you. No public feed, no followers. You can leave at any time. QUIET REMINDERS & QUIET HOURS One gentle nudge if you want one. Set quiet hours to silence reminders at night. HOME SCREEN WIDGETS Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets keep today's dots one glance away. GENTLE WEEKLY, MONTHLY, AND YEARLY REVIEWS Three quiet rooms to look back: the past week, the past month, the past year. Streaks, gentle stats, and a paper-textured year calendar. SHARE CARDS A quiet way to share a small win — turn a streak or a finished month into a paper-textured card you can save or send. MADE WITH CARE Dotted is built and maintained by Teddy App Labs. No tracking SDKs, no advertising, no third-party analytics shipped with the app. Privacy Policy: https://www.teddyapplabs.com/dotted/privacy-policy Terms of Use: https://www.teddyapplabs.com/dotted/terms-of-service
Trace by Aura
This app helps you remember why you saved something by prompting you to add a reason. It automatically organizes your saved content and brings relevant items back to your attention when they might be useful. Search by meaning, not just keywords, to find what you need.
- Save content with a personal reason
- Automatic organization without folders or tags
- Content resurfaces when relevant
- Search by meaning, not just keywords
- Cross-device sync (iPhone, iPad, Mac)
- Apple Watch integration for quick capture
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People don't forget information. They forget why it mattered. You save things all day. A reel, a link, a screenshot, a thought you did not want to lose. Weeks later you find them again and they mean nothing, because the reason you saved them is gone. Trace keeps the reason. SAVE IT, AND SAY WHY Share a reel, a link, a photo or a note into Trace, or capture a thought directly. Trace asks one short question: why does this matter? Your answer, in your own words, is the thing Trace protects. Skip the question and Trace says so plainly rather than inventing a reason on your behalf. IT SORTS ITSELF Trace reads what you saved on your device and files it. There are no folders to build and no tags to maintain. When it is unsure where something belongs it shows you its guess and lets you correct it in one tap. IT COMES BACK ON ITS OWN Trace watches for the moment a saved thing becomes useful again and brings it forward. When you wrote a reason, it shows you your sentence rather than a summary of it. When Trace is not sure, it stays quiet. Under uncertainty the correct behavior is silence, and Trace is built to prefer it. You choose how often it may interrupt and which hours stay quiet. Any memory can be silenced: it stays in your vault and stays searchable, it just stops arriving unasked. ASK YOUR VAULT Search by meaning rather than exact words. When Apple Intelligence is available on your device, Trace phrases what it found in its own words. When it is not, Trace searches with its built in engine and tells you so, instead of quietly getting worse. ON IPHONE AND IPAD Start on iPhone and continue on iPad. Trace hands off the memory you are reading, and on iPad it opens into a sidebar and split view, with Apple Pencil Scribble in the fields you write into. FROM YOUR APPLE WATCH Catch a thought on your wrist the moment you have one. Speak it and file it into a collection, or hum a tune and keep the raw audio, not a transcription of it. It reaches your vault through your private iCloud, and a voice memo plays back here and on your Mac, where you can save the file out. PRIVACY, WRITTEN AS A CONTRACT There is no Trace account and no Trace server. There is nothing to sign up for. Trace collects nothing about you, sells nothing, and carries no ads and no third party trackers. Reading and understanding happen on your device, using Apple's on-device intelligence. iCloud Sync is on by default, so a lost or replaced iPhone does not lose your vault. Your memories are kept in your own private iCloud, where they also appear on your other Apple devices. It is your iCloud account, not a Trace server, and Trace cannot read it. Apple manages the keys, so turn on Advanced Data Protection for the strongest protection. You can turn it off in Connections, and new memories then stay only on this iPhone. Link previews are off until you switch them on. When they are on, Trace fetches the public preview a page already publishes about itself, from a fixed list of sites. It sends the link and nothing else. Your notes and your vault are never part of that request. Privacy is not only about where something is kept. It is about where it shows up. A Lock Screen, a widget, a wrist someone else can see and a television in a shared room are not the same kind of place, and Trace treats each one as a decision rather than a default. You can mark a memory to appear only inside Trace, and it will stay off all of them. Export everything or delete everything, whenever you like. Deleting a memory also removes what Trace read from it, any transcript, and what it learned about its meaning. WHERE TRACE SHOWS UP Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, StandBy, a Control Center capture button, Live Activities, Siri and Shortcuts, Spotlight, and a share sheet action from the apps you already save from. Trace is not trying to hold your attention. It is trying to give you back the reason you saved something, on the day you need it.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Trace by Aura at none against Dotted's 3. Dotted's advantage is iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). On price, update cadence, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Dotted sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per month. Trace by Aura asks for nothing beyond the download.
Dotted ships an update weekly, Trace by Aura every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on September 24, 2026 and September 23, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Dotted | Trace by Aura |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | — | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | — | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | — | 2 — better |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Every 5 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | — | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 25 MB | 41 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Teddy App Labs, LLC | Karthik Barma |
In-app purchases
Dotted
- Dotted Pro Monthly$9.991 Month
- Dotted Pro Annual7 Days trial$59.991 Year
- Dotted Pro Lifetime$99.99
Trace by Aura
No in-app purchases









