If you didn’t get a chance to catch the webcast while it was happening, we’ve posted the full video from the event below, along with a few highlights.
We recently announced that the Bible App had been installed on 20 million devices, and in the short time since that announcement, we’ve reached 22 million installs.
YouVersion currently offers the Bible in 41 languages and one of our main areas of focus this year is to rapidly increase that selection. Today, people can read the Bible or a portion of the Bible in about 2,000 languages, but there are more than 6,000 languages spoken throughout the world. Our goal is to make YouVersion available in every single language in existence.
More than 25% of the new installations of the Bible App occur on phones that are set to a language other than English, and Korean is the fastest growing language. By the end of the year, we hope to see 40-50% of new installations happening in languages other than English.
We announced a feature that many of us in the YouVersion community have been looking forward to—highlights! The feature is newly available on Android phones and will be coming to BlackBerry and iOS devices in the coming months.
The Bible App is here to help us all make God’s Word a part of our daily lives, but we also know how meaningful it is to share what we’re experiencing with others. To make this easier, we’ve set up a way for you to create your own meetups with other people who are passionate about the Bible. We’re also planning on adding social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter, and later this year we’ll be expanding the features offered for YouVersion Groups.
We’ve been aggressively working to upgrade the support we offer the YouVersion community. A new support site was just launched and we plan on including in-app access to support in coming releases.
Improved search functionality within the Bible App will be included on future updates to make it easier to find words and phrases in Scripture.
Many of you asked how you could say thank you to the Bible societies and publishers who make it possible for the YouVersion community to engage with so many great versions of Scripture for free. At the bottom of each version of the Bible you read in the Bible App, you’ll notice a link to more information about the organization who makes that version available. We encourage you to visit that link, contact them to say thank you, or support them financially. They are truly the heroes in making these versions freely available to all of us.
Thanks again for being a part of what God is doing through YouVersion. All of this truly could not happen without you. We believe that we could see half a billion or even one billion people engaging with Scripture through the Bible App as, together, we continue to take steps toward becoming the most Bible-engaged generation in history.
This post is also available in: Russian