Summary: We came across a new prayer app released this year, and as its name implies, it focuses on the the essential prayers that many Catholics are familiar with and use in prayer on a regular basis. This new app has a unique funding direction, that is different from all of the other Catholic apps that I have reviewed. This app does not contain the thousands of prayers that are definitely a treasure in the Church, but rather it focuses on the most common, with a few unique prayers thrown in as well. This app includes Daily prayers, Occasional prayers, Litanies, Novenas, Marian Prayers, Prayer to Jesus, Prayers to Saints and a lot more. You can easily tag a ‘favourite’ or bookmark the prayers that you want to access quickly. I can see this new FREE app becoming a favourite amongst Catholic app users. It is available for both iOS and Android devices. It is beautiful, and well put together, sorted into easy to use categories.
Catholic prayers Home screen keeps everything at your fingertips!
Highlights
There are a few highlights that are exciting to find in this app. Favourites are one of the necessary features for apps with a lot of content. This app doesn’t miss the great opportunity to make it useful and customized for each user. This is great because there is such a vast amount of prayers available in this app, and not all of the prayers appeal to everyone. The favourite feature allows the user to tailor the list of prayers that they love and keep them at the forefront.
Catholic Prayers app- Prayer for Vocations screen shot.
The Catholic Prayer app is an excellent place to begin a life of prayer
Catholic Prayers app – screenshot of the Act of Spiritual Communion
Hourly Chime
By tapping on the angel icon in the upper left corner, it brings you to the main settings for the app. One of the features I think could be useful with this app is hourly notifications. Although a notification is a useful tool, having only an hourly notification setting is not very useful and doesn’t work for me. I would love to have a choice in setting how often notifications come in.
You can change the prayer app’s settings for what ‘rings’ each hour.
A new Daily Bible Quote Widget
On iOS devices like the iPod, iPad, and iPhone the notification centre allows for app developers to add in small widgets. The Catholic Prayer app adds a Daily Bible Quote widget to the notifications area. It isn’t clear where the quotes are coming from or if there is a particular order to them. It is a nice addition, although I noted that ‘Bible’ is spelled incorrectly – ooops! I am not sure how particularly useful this part of the app is. It doesn’t seem to connect with the rest of the content of the app.
Catholic prayers app notification center
Teleprompter View / Prayer View
Once you have selected a prayer, it is displayed nicely with various sizes of fonts. This makes it easy to read and see where the prayers start and end. Full screen Teleprompter with adjustable speed. I haven’t found a way to make this useful yet, but you never know….
Prayer Counter
What a great idea! In the bottom corner of the prayer screen you can keep track of how many times you have prayed a particular prayer. I like this, and I haven’t seen this in any other app.
Long press on the number to reset the number, it’s really easy.
You can track your ‘prayer progress’ by tapping on the number.
Share the Prayers With Your Friends and Family
I was expecting to be able to share the actual prayers with family and friends, however the only share option I found was to share the app URL with others.
It’s free but with a bit of a unique catch.
The app has ads on the bottom of every page. While I am not a fan of ads in apps, I can understand that the developer needs to recoup some of the costs for the time and talent needed to get this app to the app store. One of the other ways this developer has chosen to recoup some fo the costs is to add the opportunity for users to watch a video ad. These ads are worth a bit more to the developer. This is great for the developer, as it is a way of recouping some cost, but as you can see in the screenshot the content of the ads may not necessarily reflect my values, and may not be something that I want my children to watch. I am glad that it is a bit hidden behind the angel. I think a better option for this Developer is to remove the ads and place a small price tag on the app – I would happily pay for an app like this, if the price point is right, just so I don’t need to deal with ads.
This is the settings dialogue box for the app.
Catholic Prayers app, in app ads aren’t under your control.
The Catholic prayers app allows you to ‘pay’ the developer by watching an ad.
This is a great app idea and good initial set up, but it needs a little bit of work, and definitely needs to deal with the ad issue, before I would feel comfortable widely recommending this app.
This app isn’t the only prayer app we have reviewed, including Mary Our Mother Foundation MOM App, iBreviary, and the prayer notebook.
A great new app for 2016! Catholic Prayers and a focus on expanding the app. It’s free, but with a little catch.
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