In 2012 we printed a page of YouVersion's numbers. It has since passed a billion installs

An idea in an airport queue

Bobby Gruenewald was standing in an airport security line, on staff at what was then LifeChurch.tv in Oklahoma, when the question occurred to him: could technology help him read the Bible more consistently?

It started as a website and did not go anywhere in particular. What changed it was timing. When Apple opened the App Store in 2008, the Bible App was among the first two hundred applications in it — which meant that for a while, if you had an iPhone and wanted a Bible, there was essentially one.

Seventeen years later it offers more than 3,600 Bible translations in over 2,300 languages, and adds around 1,200 new pieces of content a month — reading plans, videos, devotionals — supplied through a network of more than 31,000 partners, including some 7,200 content partners and 25,000 churches.

The part that matters most here

There are three apps, not one, and the second is the interesting one for readers in India.

Bible App Lite is built for offline use, for markets with device and data limitations. That is a deliberate engineering decision with a cost attached: somebody had to argue for building a stripped-down version for people on cheap phones and expensive data, in a company that could have spent the same effort on features for the users it already had.

The third is the Bible App for Kids, made with OneHope, which is animation rather than text.

And the whole thing is free. No advertising, no subscription tier, funded by donations. At a billion installs that is a genuinely unusual choice, and it is worth naming plainly, because almost nothing else operating at that scale has made it.

A note about the numbers

Here is where a magazine ought to be careful, including about its own 2012 page.

Installs, app opens, daily active users, engagement days — these are the metrics of the attention economy, and they are the right ones for measuring an app. Whether they measure what anyone actually wants measured is a different question. An install is a download. An app open is a tap. Neither is a person understanding anything, and the distance between the two is precisely where the interesting part of the Christian life happens.

An install is a download. An app open is a tap. Neither is a person understanding anything.

On measuring Bible engagement

YouVersion knows this better than its critics do — Gruenewald talks about lives changed rather than downloads, and the company's own framing is that the milestone is a celebration of the Bible rather than of the software. But the figure that gets printed is still the billion, because the billion is the figure that exists.

We printed 1,698 app opens a minute in 2012 without asking what an app open was. Worth doing better with the next set.

What actually changed

The thing that has genuinely moved in fourteen years is not the install count. It is the language count.

Over 2,300 languages, and rising, mostly through translation partners and volunteer localisation teams doing unglamorous work that nobody markets. For a reader in a language with four speakers of English for every hundred people, that is the number that means something. Fifty million downloads in 2012 was a story about American iPhones. Two thousand three hundred languages is a story about everybody else.

That is the part our 2012 page missed, and it was the part worth printing.