A million teenagers have installed YouVersion's new Bible app. It was tested in India first.
YouVersion put out a new app last Wednesday. It is called Bible Loop, it is built for teenagers, and within a week its founder was telling an American newspaper it had passed a million installs.
The detail worth stopping on is where it came from.
"Bible Loop began last year as a test in India," Bobby Gruenewald, YouVersion's founder and chief executive, told The Christian Post in emailed comments. The reason, he said, was that the ministry was seeing strong engagement here with its Bible App for Kids, and wanted to see what could be built on top of it.
Indian children using a cartoon Bible app turned into a product for teenagers in every other country. That is not the usual direction of travel for software, and it is worth saying out loud.
What the app actually does
Three things, mainly. There is a verse memorisation game with four levels and an anonymous leaderboard, which YouVersion's own page says has already carried teenagers through more than 26,000 memorised verses. There is a daily check-in, where you pick how you are feeling and get a devotional matched to it. And there is a verse of the day you can set as your home screen.
The interface is in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The Bible text inside it runs to more than fifty versions across ten languages, which is a different and larger number, and YouVersion does not break down which ten.
It was made with OneHope, a ministry that has worked with children and young people since 1987. Gruenewald says OneHope's research shaped the app. One figure of theirs sits behind the whole design: the generation below today's teenagers spends an average of four hours and six minutes online a day.
What to watch for next
The next thing to look for is the language list. Bible Loop ships with its interface in four languages, and English is the one Indian readers will reach for. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Bengali are not there yet.
That is where a new product starts rather than where it ends, and YouVersion has one of the better records anywhere on this: the main Bible App runs in well over a thousand languages. An app that began life in India has a good chance of coming back in Indian languages, and that is the announcement worth waiting for.
There is a second thing nobody has published. Gruenewald told The Christian Post the app is now available worldwide, but YouVersion has not put out a country list, and we could not confirm from any source that Bible Loop can be downloaded in India today. If you go looking for it and it is not there, that is why.
About that million
Gruenewald told The Christian Post that Bible Loop had passed one million installs. YouVersion's own Bible Loop page, when this piece was first published, still showed 995,000. We put the gap to YouVersion rather than quietly choosing the rounder number, and its press team confirmed to 5Talents on 9 November that one million is the current figure and that the page had not caught up with it. YouVersion said it would correct the page the same day.
Either way, a million downloads in a week is a reach most ministries will never have, and it is worth remembering what an install is and is not. It is a teenager tapping a button. The 26,000 memorised verses are the number that would tell you whether anything happened after that, and it is a much smaller one.
Why this one is worth your attention
YouVersion is a ministry of Life.Church, an American congregation, and it has been running since 2007. Most of what it builds is designed in Oklahoma and translated outward. Bible Loop was not. It was tried here first, because something was already working here, and the rest of the world got the finished version.
For a church in Hyderabad or Kochi or Shillong wondering whether its young people are a mission field or a test market for somebody else's product, that is a more interesting answer than the usual one. India was not the place this was rolled out to. It is the place it came from.
Sources
- New Bible Loop app gives teens a reason to slow down with God's Word, YouVersion
- YouVersion launches Bible Loop app to help teens study Scripture, The Christian Post
- Bible Loop — product page, YouVersion
Premasis Satman
Founder and Executive Director of 5Talents Magazine, writing from Hyderabad. He has written the magazine's editorial column since the first issue in July 2012.
