We have built something and put it online for free. It is called XA Daily, it lives at xtraamerican.com/daily, and it asks about four minutes of you each morning and rather less at night. The whole King James Bible is in there too.
There are a great many Bible apps. Most of them want an account, a subscription, or a slice of your attention they can sell on. This one wants none of those. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to download from an app store, and nothing you write ever reaches our servers.
One Hebrew word a day
The thing we could not find anywhere else was a Hebrew word treated seriously and briefly. Not a devotional dressed up with a Hebrew word on top, and not a lexicon entry either — just the word, how to actually say it, what it means, and the bit of it that is genuinely interesting.
Day two is chesed, which the King James usually renders mercy or lovingkindness. It is love with an obligation inside it: the loyalty of someone who has bound themselves to you and will not walk away. Day twenty-two is rachamim, compassion, built on the same consonants as rechem, the womb — Hebrew pictures compassion as the ache a mother feels for the child she carried. Day twenty-seven is shema, which means both to hear and to obey, because Hebrew has no separate word for obeying. If you did not act, the language assumes you did not really hear.
Hebrew word
חֶסֶד
chesed
KHEH-sed
loyal love, covenant kindness
Morning reading
O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.
Who has shown you loyalty you did not earn?
Morning · the word, the reading, and room to answer
Somewhere to actually write
Every question has a box under it. What you type saves as you go, and after a month you have a month of your own words sitting there. That turned out to matter more than anything else we added — it is the difference between reading something and having thought about it.
A prayer list that remembers
“Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” — 1 Peter 5:7
That verse is the whole design brief. Add a name or a situation and it keeps count of how long you have carried it. Add a note when something shifts and it stacks underneath, dated, so you can see the shape of the thing over months rather than just its title. Edit the wording when the situation itself changes. Share one with somebody if you want them praying too. Mark it answered and it moves to a second list, still holding the date you first wrote it down.
That is the part we care about most. People are good at asking and poor at noticing. Six months on, the app can tell you that you carried something for a hundred and forty-three days before it turned — and you would almost certainly have forgotten you ever asked.
A short list is easy. A long one is not, so three things keep it usable. Tap the star on the handful you pray every morning and they stay pinned above everything else. Search finds a prayer by its wording, its label or its notes — you are far more likely to remember the consultant moved it to Thursday than how you phrased the thing back in March. And you can label them, Family or Church or Work, then tap a label and pray only that set.
The labels are optional and there is nothing to set up. No folder has to exist before you can write a name down, and a prayer with no label just sits in the list like the rest. Filing is the part everybody abandons, so the app never asks you to do it first.
What are you carrying?
Answered
Pinned to the top, labelled, and searchable
Night is shorter on purpose
One verse, one question, and a short prayer to close. Morning and evening prayer is not a new idea — the daily office has ended the day like this for something like fifteen hundred years. The evening is meant to finish a day, not start another train of thought.
The words stack up
Everything you have reached sits in a grid that fills in as you go. Days still ahead of you stay greyed out.
Words learned
9 of 90 so far.
Nine down, and the grid keeps filling
The whole Bible is in it
All 31,102 verses of the King James, served from our own site rather than pushing you off to someone else’s. Every reading has a Read the chapter link that opens it inside the app, and from there you can walk forward and back through the entire Bible — the end of Genesis rolls straight into Exodus.
Tap any verse to save it. There is a search box as well: type a phrase like still waters and it comes back with Psalm 23:2 and nothing else.
Tapping Bible gives you all sixty-six books; tap one and you get its chapters. Tap Bible again from inside a chapter and you are back at the list, so you can get from Habakkuk to Hebrews without going through the front door.
Psalms 23
1The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
The reader · a saved verse stays marked
Getting that text in took two goes. The first public-domain file we tried turned out to be missing Mark 7:11 — the Corban verse — along with eight other broken chapters, and it had translator marginal notes glued onto six thousand verses. We only found out by loading a second, independent copy and comparing all 31,102 verses one by one. The two agreed everywhere that mattered, and the clean one is what you are reading.
Dark, and big enough to read
It opens dark, with the text on the largest of the three sizes. Both are deliberate: this thing gets used in bed at either end of the day, and a white screen at half past five in the morning is an unkind way to be greeted. If you would rather have it light, or follow whatever your phone is doing, that is under Settings along with the text size — but you should not have to go and find it on the first morning.
No streak to lose
It counts total mornings and evenings, never consecutive ones, and there is no code anywhere in it that can send you back to zero. A reading habit that punishes you for one bad week is working against the thing it is supposed to be for.
A nudge, if you want one
Reminders are off unless you turn them on, and you pick the times. One in the morning, one at night, and nothing else — we will never send anything about the shop through it. On iPhone they only work once the app is on your home screen, and the app says so rather than letting you switch it on and wonder why nothing arrives.
Your writing stays on your phone
Your answers, your prayer list, saved verses, what you have marked answered — all of it is stored on your own device and never sent to us. We cannot read it, because we never receive it.
The honest trade-off: clearing your browser data or moving to a new phone will lose it. There is an Export button at the bottom of the app that saves everything to a file, and it is worth pressing occasionally.
Putting it on your home screen
On iPhone, open it in Safari — it has to be Safari — tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, open it in Chrome, tap the three dots, then Install app. Either way it gets its own icon and opens full screen, and it works with no signal once loaded.
Day one is emunah: steadiness under load, and the root behind the word amen. Habakkuk 2:4 — the just shall live by his faith.