The short version
The We Believe Foundation is a Utah non-profit that makes free scripture-study apps for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In February 2021 they brought us a rough prototype of an app then called Come Follow Me. We rebuilt it as native iOS and Android apps and submitted the first version to Apple about ten weeks later. Five years on, it has about 75,000 monthly active users and a 4.9-star rating on both stores, and we’re still the team shipping it.
Where it started
The prototype did one thing well: a short daily devotional. Users wanted more from it, and some of what they asked for was basic. Evan Fitzpatrick, the foundation’s founder, told us people had asked for copy and paste over and over, and the old app couldn’t do it.
The foundation also wanted Android kept in step with iOS, and they wanted their own staff publishing new content every day without waiting on a developer.
What we built
Two native apps, Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android, reading from the same content. Devotionals and Verse of the Day stories live in Contentful, a hosted content system, so the foundation’s team publishes each day’s material themselves. Firebase handles sign-in, including Apple and Google accounts, and keeps each user’s favorites and journal entries. Mixpanel shows which parts people actually use.
The Verse of the Day story is the part people respond to most. It’s a tap-through format that mixes the verse with photos and video, then asks the reader to set a daily study reminder. We shipped it on iOS in July 2021 and on Android the following weekend. Gary Mangum, a volunteer developer on the foundation’s side, pulled the numbers right after: just over 50% of iOS users set a reminder the first time they were asked.
A Spanish version, Ven Sígueme, followed in July 2022, along with a home-screen widget that shows the day’s verse.
What didn’t go to plan
Honestly, the first release grew while we were building it. Five weeks in, the designs were more involved than the ones we’d estimated from, and more requests came in mid-build. We moved journaling, account deletion, and in-app pop-ups to later releases so the Verse of the Day could ship on time.
Android was planned to trail iOS by three to four weeks. That was in our plan from the start, but it wasn’t how the foundation understood it, and we had to reset that in June.
Then there was Contentful. By May 2021 the app made about 50,000 requests a day, and the free plan allowed 2 million a month. We cut the requests the widget was making, and the foundation moved to a paid plan.
In August 2023 the app was renamed We Believe on about a week and a half of notice. We cut that release down to the changes that had to make the date and left the rest for the next one.
Listening to scripture
The newest work is audio. In 2026 we tested a Come Follow Me audio player on iOS, narrated with AI voices from ElevenLabs, before the foundation committed to the full build. Between July 17 and 28, 8.8% of roughly 37,000 active users tapped the audio card, and median listening time went from 18 seconds to 91.
The foundation approved the full version in August, and we’re building it now. It covers all five volumes of scripture with several voices per chapter. As each verse is read, the transcript highlights it. A small Node.js server with a Postgres database, hosted on Fly.io, serves the audio from Cloudflare R2 storage along with word-level timing for the transcript. Chapter headings and footnotes aren’t narrated yet, because checking pronunciation across several AI voices takes longer than generating them.
