Prayers is an easy-to-use, multi-language Christian Prayers database. It represents the ultimate reference to Catholic Prayers for iPhone and iPod Touch.
The native iPhone app is in the top 10 of the Reference Category in the Italian App Store, and in the top 100 apps for the Reference Category in Spain and France.

Prayers is no-frills and functional: it has been designed to keep handy all of the Common Prayers listed in the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and many more in English, Latin, Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish. It provides very good readability with high a contrast background black-on-white color scheme and provides the option to enlarge the font of the screen. It’s also perfect in low-light environments thanks to a white text on black background color scheme option.

The app also supports device orientation (Portrait and Landscape use), with a wider readable area while in landscape view and allows to switch language on-the-fly to see the current prayer in any of the languages that prayer is available.

A new Prayers version (1.2) is in the works and will be out shortly. It now features over 1000 prayers. Here’s what’s in it:

• All 24 Official Common Prayers as listed in the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (including the Angelus, the Regina Caeli and the Memorare);
• The new Catholic Doctrine category includes all the formulas of the Catholic Doctrine as listed in the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church;
• Holy Rosary Mysteries with scriptures for meditation (public domain Bible translations were used where available);
• Pray mode with numbering for Rosary-based prayers and beads sounds (Holy Rosary and the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy);
• Daily Prayers (including morning offering and prayer before meals);
• Prayers to Saints and Angels;
• Rosary Litanies;
• Novenas;
• Via Crucis;
• Divine Mercy;
• Blessings;
• Lent specific prayers;
• A more refined user interface.

The big difference between Prayers iPhone app and the similar ones out there, is that you can actually use Prayers for your reference: all prayers are just a few taps away and are well organized. You won’t loose yourself into the interface and you won’t get distracted by colorful eye candy… and of corse, it costs just US$ 0.99.

There have been a few specific use cases I had in mind when I designed this app. I had an iPod Touch at the time so one of my requirements was to have the complete database stored locally on the device. I also wanted it multi-language in order for the app to be accessible to as many people as possible. There are times in which you need an immediate access to a few specific prayers that, if you’re like me, you never memorized.

For example, the rosary-based Divine Mercy prayer is something that you hardly remember, and that you never know when you’ll need (it is often prayed for people that are in desperate conditions). Some traditional prayers, like the Come Holy Spirit, is not very well known between the younger generations of catholics, and instead should really be part of our daily prayers along with the Our Father and Hail Mary… or like the Act of Contrition — you may want to check on it before going to confession or just read it out if you can’t remember it.

Since I’ve been a developer myself prior to fully devote to management tasks, my thought has been “oh boy, I need a cheat sheet for these prayers so that I can keep these handy at all times”. If you’re like me, you don’t have a bible in the car next to the umbrella, and even the times you have a bible with you, those little sheets with prayers kept into the bible get lost continuously — but your iPhone or iPod Touch is always with you and, if you’re like me, you always have a car charger next to that umbrella. As you see, one could say I created a Catholic app for “not-so-good-Catholic” people :)

And actually some time after the initial launch, it was clear that “better Catholics” (more prayerful people than I) wanted more. For this reason we added Novenas and Litanies with a follow-up update along with the French localization of the full database and interface. As of version 1.1 all content was available in all languages (but latin). So you get the same contents no matter what language you speak.

In this latest Prayers 1.2 version we had to change this, because supporting all languages at the same time is a huge effort and was retaining us from keeping our customers happy. Version 1.2 features a lot of contents addition in english and some in Italian. We also did some corrections based on the feedback we received through iTunes reviews.

We really hope you will appreciate the efforts and we will keep listening to your feedback!
Get Prayers now on the App Store!