Press
The Daily Canon, in fact
What the app is, the numbers with the dates they were counted, the assets, the open dataset, and a person to write to. Quiet on purpose.
What it is
One work of literature for each day of the year. Great writing in all its forms, one day at a time.
The Daily Canon is an iPhone app. Each day it presents one work of literature, drawn from a canon that reaches from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present, under a painted sky of its own, with a short blurb written by a person. Around that daily page: a Library of books read in full, a reading goal, reading paths, immersions read alongside other readers, a streak, a personal ranking called My Canon, and Bloomy, a personal librarian who has read the canon and the reader’s own log.
The free tier is the daily work and the practice around it. Folio, the paid tier, opens the Library, Bloomy and the rest, and is how the writing gets paid for. There are no ads and no data sold.
Who made it
Hal Wall built it in London, at first for nobody but himself, and still opens it every morning before anything else. The full account is on the About page, in his own words.
The line to quote
A lifetime of literature, one day at a time.
The numbers
Counted, and dated
- Over 20,000
- downloads
- 4.8
- App Store rating
- 16 July 2026
- App of the Day, App Store
- Four millennia
- from Gilgamesh to the present
- Ten
- languages
- iOS 26
- iPhone only, native Swift
September 2026
live
dated
the canon
the app
the app
Assets
Marks, icon, badge, photograph
- Wordmark, greenSVG
- Wordmark, whiteSVG
- Logo mark, greenPNG
- Logo mark, blackPNG
- Logo mark, whitePNG
- App icon512 px PNG
- App Store badgeSVG
- Founder photographJPG
Everything at once
One archive, with the app screens.
The marks and the icon above, the badge, the photograph, and the app’s own screens as they are added. Stills of the painted scenes at 1920×1080 and 1080×1920 on request.
Download the press kitThe open dataset
The Daily Canon as data
The daily canon, openly published as machine-readable data: 1379 curated works of literature, one for each day of the year, each with its author, publication year, literary form, themes, a notable extract, and an original editorial blurb. The collection spans roughly four millennia, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present.
It is free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Use it, build on it, train on it, quote it. The only ask is attribution to The Daily Canon (thedailycanon.org).
Each record
date (MM-DD calendar slot), id, title, author, year, type (the literary form), original_language, author_nationality, themes, important_day, extract, blurb, and url.