LIFE.CHURCH in OKLAHOMA CITY – The YouVersion Bible app has now surpassed 800 million downloads worldwide, and it has become so prevalent that it’s reshaping the future of Bible engagement.
Before becoming one of the most downloaded apps globally, helping millions access the Bible in over 2,000 languages, YouVersion founder Bobby Gruenewald says it all started as a simple website attempting to solve a big problem.
“I wish I could tell you that it just took off and it was this great success. The reality of it was, after a lot of work and after a lot of doors being opened and a lot of people collectively working on it, the website was a failure,” he recalls.
Bobby was looking for an easier way to read the Bible more consistently using technology. But the solution he envisioned hadn’t yet been invented.
“And so Steve Jobs, in early 2008 announced it was going to be possible to develop apps for the iPhone and create some brand new thing called an app store,” he explains.
Not knowing what an app was, he recruited a 19-year-old on his team to build what the world today calls the Bible app.
The Bible app was a hit, starting out as one of 200 free apps on the Apple store. In the first week, more than 80,000 people downloaded it.
Today, the Bible app is opened more than 270 times each second. It supports 70-plus languages, with more than 2,000 Bible translations.
“Between 10 and 12 million per month,” Gruenewald says. “These are new devices that are installing the Bible app.”
If you’ve ever used YouVersion to follow a reading plan or find a daily verse, you’re part of a community that’s reshaping how we engage with scripture. On Easter Sunday alone, YouVersion saw a record-breaking 17 million users, with 3.5 million new installs. Gruenewald believes this surge in Bible engagement is part of a larger global trend.
“The narrative that people no longer read the Bible is simply not true. We have evidence and empirical data, real data, not just a survey that someone had somewhere, that indicates that there is momentum globally around scripture engagement,” he says. “So we should be encouraged to know that God’s word is very alive and well, and if anything, more relevant to today’s culture than maybe ever before in human history.”
YouVersion offers three products: the Bible app, the Bible app for kids, and Bible app lite, designed for regions where internet access is limited, but not in the U.S. Now, the team is in beta mode with Bible app loop, geared toward tweens. It’s being tested in India.
As the app continues to grow, its future is being shaped by one of the most powerful technologies of our time—artificial intelligence.
“We’re being very careful to make sure that there’s good transparency, and that we are able to make sure that if it’s ever answering questions, or if we ever choose to have a feature that does that, that it does it with accuracy,” Gruenewald says.
Beyond impressive numbers, YouVersion’s growth is driven by a deeper mission: to help people connect with God and his Word. The app generates no revenue and operates solely through donations.
“Like I mentioned, 200- and, almost, 40,000 donors last year that supported it around the tune about $60 million is kind of the scale and scope of what YouVersion is today. That’s grown quite a bit in the last few years,” Gruenewald says.
That surge is in part coordinated between donors and Bible translation groups, working to accelerate the pace at which every single language could have some portion of scripture translated – hopefully by 2033, the 2,000th anniversary of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we could see every language have some portion of scripture translated.
“It’s imperative, we think, to be able to have God’s Word in every single heart language, so that every single person has the benefit that we have of even able to hear God’s voice, hear Jesus’s words in their own language,” Gruenewald says.
As YouVersion continues to expand, its mission remains the same: to use technology to make the Bible accessible to everyone. Gruenewald says YouVersion is working with nearly 1,000 companies to leverage AI for good – and to promote an ecosystem within the faith community around using tech to its fullest potential.
“So until we can be sure of those things, our uses of AI are going to be much more in the realm of machine learning or ways that we use it to help us make recommendations around content or connect or label content in a way that makes it more useful for us when we search and look for things,” Gruenewald says.
