I use YouVersion's Bible App for daily Bible reading. Sometime this year I decided to use one of their recommended plans to read the Bible in what I understood would take a year (read the Bible in a year). I had gotten prompts before to try their different plans and had always ignored it. I wasn't also a fan of trying to read the Bible in a year (I was never able to stick to the plan; I usually felt pressured because of the time frame). Anyway, I decided to give this a trial and was pleasantly surprised by how it was going. I was only able to read on one day (usually on the weekends). I believe I only received 5 passages to read and they weren't complete chapters which meant it didn't look like too much of a time committment. The first time I missed a weekend, I thought the next weekend would be intense (I would have a lot to catch up) but this didn't happen (I don't recall if the pace didn't change or if I was only given a few extra passages to read).
One weekend, I opened up the App to do my reading (as part of my Bible reading plan for the year) and I got a popup message that I couldn't continue with the plan because I wasn't signed up. I don't recall seing any warning that starting that plan required a sign-up then or in the future. I also didn't get a warning notification the previous weekend or before then that I was nearing the end of access to the plan without signing up. For the first time I was actually [[mostly]] enjoying reading multiple Bible passages and felt I was on track to at least read a significant portion of the Bible. I even found time to Google (research) some stuff that I found interesting while reading the Bible. But now I was blindsided by this abrupt termination. I would have understood if the App was asking me to purchase a license (it takes effort to build and maintain the App) and would have paid for a license but they weren't. They just needed my email address and maybe some other personal data. Why?
Prior to this, I was getting frustrated with the Bible App - the daily devotion(I still liked the words/messages). It seemed to me like each subsequent version introduced more bugs and slowed down the App even more. The App was becoming more difficult to navigate (swiping/clicking didn't always do what I expected, it was sometimes difficult to move forward or go back or know when I had gotten to the end). I also very much disliked the gamification of the App (this is a personal preference; some folks love it). Some days, I just wasn't in the mood to read the Bible but I would remember the streak and I didn't want to break it and so I would be very much tempted to just open the App and click through the pages so I wouldn't lose the streak and I didn't like this. This in turn also made me feel pressured to read the Bible even when I didn't feel like or when I felt like I didn't have time for a proper study of the word. There was also the constant nudge to sign-up (yes it was free but I value privacy and don't believe we should blindly hand over personal data unless strictly needed). To download some versions of the Bible required a sign-up, to see something required a sign-up.
A combination of all these made me decide to build an Bible Reading App that suited my needs (after all, I'm in the Software Industry). I needed the App to do a few things
- No bait and switch
- No gamification
- No pressure to sign-up
- data is stored locally (on your device)
- you only sign-up (and sync your data to the cloud) if you wish to continue your progress on other devices (e.g start the plan on an iPhone and continue it on an iPad or the web)
- no up-selling of any kind
- No pressure as you move through the plan i.e. if you miss a day,
- you continue whenever you can
- if you prefer, you can also catch up on your missed days so that you meet your original schedule
As mentioned earlier, I'm in the Software Industry and so I know that you don't wait till you have an App that meets all of your requirements before you put it out in public. What you just need is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This means the early versions of this App won't neccessarily meet all of my requirements but it MUST meet the most important ones - no bait and switch, no gamification, no pressure to sign-up.
No bait and switch means I tell you upfront that this is a Paid App. You get to try it for a given number of days and then you'll have to buy a license if you wish to continue using it. I'm charging for it as a compensation for my time and to encourage me to keep working on it (for public use).