The problem
The We Believe Foundation had a clear mission: help youth and young adults build a daily practice of faith. What they needed was a product that could make that practice feel rewarding enough to sustain, not just in the first week, but long-term.
Devotional apps have a retention problem. Content is easy to deliver; the habit of returning is hard to build. The foundation wanted an experience that combined meaningful daily content with the kind of engagement mechanics that actually work: streaks, badges, points, and progress tracking, without making it feel like a game for the sake of gamification.
What we built
HQ handled design and development for iOS, Android, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. The core experience is a short daily devotional, typically a few minutes, delivered through a structured content flow. The session design keeps it accessible: someone can complete it in a spare moment without needing to carve out dedicated time.
The engagement layer reinforces the habit. Streaks track consecutive days, badges mark milestones, and points accumulate across every session. Progress statistics let users see how far they’ve come over time, weekly, monthly, and across the life of their account.
The results
The app launched to strong reception. Within the first year: 4.9 stars on the App Store from over 1,500 reviews, a rating that reflects genuine product quality, not a one-time push. The app is free, built to stay free, and maintained by a non-profit foundation.
The platform is now available across iOS, Android, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro, a multi-platform footprint that required a tight design system and shared component logic across multiple build targets.
How it is built
The iOS app is written in Swift and the Android app in Kotlin, and both talk to a Node backend running on Fly.io. Content comes from Contentful, so the foundation publishes a devotional without a developer touching anything.
Both platforms ship home screen widgets, which for a daily habit app is where the habit actually lives. Signing in runs through Apple Sign In on iOS, with a matching handshake on Android.
Streaks got their own repair pass. A streak that miscounts is worse than no streak at all, because that number is the reason somebody opens the app on day forty. One fix covers a person who opens the app, flies somewhere the date is a day earlier, and opens it again.
Points were tuned the same way. After the trivia game shipped, the foundation came back and asked us to divide every point value by ten. Their reasoning was that a daily game meant people were banking points faster than the milestones could keep up with.
Still shipping
The apps have gone out through versions 1.4 to 1.5.1, and iOS 26 support landed as soon as it was needed. The typeface changed after launch too, from Freight Text Book to Merriweather.
Mixpanel records every event and Datadog watches the backend, so the foundation can see which content holds attention and which does not.
