YouVersion Bible App Hits 1M Installs in 11 days

By Michelle A. Vu , Christian Post Reporter

December 30, 2010|5:48 pm

Just a month after reaching the milestone of 10 million downloads, the YouVersion Bible app has set another record – 1 million installs within a mere 11 days.

From Dec. 18 to 28, the Bible app topped the reference category in the iTunes store, beating out the likes of Google Mobile, Dictionary and Wikipedia. The number of downloads for the period is remarkable given that the app had not even been able to reach the million-installs-a-month milestone previously.

“We’ve been growing each month so that we had just under one million new people installing it on a monthly basis for the last few months,” said Bobby Gruenewald, innovation leader at LifeChurch.tv, to The Christian Post on Thursday. “This month we not only passed one million for the month but one million in 11 days.”

Gruenewald and the digerati team at LifeChurch.tv, one of the top 10 largest churches in America, first launched the YouVersion for online users in 2007. The program was adapted for mobile phones in 2008 and has since skyrocketed to popularity.

LifeChurch.tv designed the Bible app to address a critical problem it saw – Bible illiteracy. The Bible app was meant to be an innovative way to connect the younger generation to the Word of God.

The YouVersion team has since expanded its vision from reaching only the youth to also providing the Word of God to people around the world. The Bible app is offered in more than 20 different languages on nine different platforms.

This week, the team released the Chinese (traditional and simplified) versions on YouVersion.com for online users. The Chinese version for the Bible app will be available soon.

While the Chinese government is known to block some religious websites, the YouVersion site is still accessible to Christians in mainland China. The Chinese government has also not censored apps in the iTunes store.

For the new year, the YouVersion team’s goal is to have users read 1 billion minutes of the Bible in the month of January alone. By comparison, it took 18 months to reach the first billion minutes.

“2011 is the year that we hope to see a lot of people discover or rediscover the Bible,” said Gruenewald. “We just think it is a great thing that ought to be part of our daily lives and that is why we created the app so that it is easier for the Bible to be part of our daily lives.”