How I Spent 2025 Building a Bible App

I didn’t plan to spend all of 2025 building an app.

It just sort of happened. One weekend I was messing around with an idea. I was thinking about the lack of Biblical knowledge so many young people have today. So many Christians. For some reason, we neglect to know the why behind what we believe.

The app is called Scriptured . It’s a Bible study app with quizzes, reading plans, memorization tools, apologetics content, and sermon writing tools. I know… pretty scattered.

Where This Whole Thing Started

I tried every app out there. YouVersion. Dwell. Logos. They’re fine. Some of them are really good, actually. But none of them quite fit what I wanted.

I wanted apologetics content baked right in so I could actually defend what I believed when someone challenged me. I wanted scripture memorization that didn’t feel like a chore. I wanted hover tooltips that would show me the verse text when I saw a reference like “Romans 8:28” without having to click away and lose my place. Kinda like what Logos had but without all the extra seminary stuff. I wanted a place to write my sermons.

Sam, why didn’t you just build what you wanted?

Good question. I did. AI Code tools have gotten CONSIDERABLY better, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The First Six Months

I started building Scriptured in late 2024, but 2025 is when it became a real thing.

January through June was all about getting the foundation right. Reading plans. User accounts. The basic infrastructure. Boring stuff. Essential stuff.

I built a scripture parsing system that could detect Bible references in basically any format. “John 3:16” obviously, but also “Jn 3:16” and “1 John 3:16” and “John 3:16-17” and all the weird edge cases you don’t think about until you’re three hours into debugging why “Philemon” keeps getting confused with “Philippians.”

I integrated 31 Bible translations. KJV, ESV, NIV, NKJV, NLT, NASB, and a bunch more. Because people have preferences and I didn’t want anyone feeling locked into a translation they didn’t like.

The database grew. The codebase grew. My to-do list grew faster than I could check things off.

I was working my day job, coming home, eating dinner, and then coding until midnight or 1 AM. Weekends disappeared into feature development and bug fixes. I became intimately familiar with the quirks of mobile-responsive design and the headaches of supporting both iOS and Android web experiences. My wife can tell you… I was a bit obsessed.

Was it sustainable? Probably not.

Did I care? At the time… not really.

Why Apologetics Matters More Than Ever

As I was in the process of devlelopment, I remember hearing the news that Charlie Kirk had been assasinated. Saw that gruesome video. It shook me. It shook a lot of us. Here was a man who stood up, publicly and courageously, to defend the truth of God’s Word in a culture that increasingly despises it. And someone killed him for it.

Satan wants to silence the voices of reason. He wants to eliminate the people who stand firm on Biblical truth and challenge the lies of the age. That’s not hyperbole. That’s spiritual warfare made visible.

Most Christians couldn’t defend their faith if their lives depended on it.

I’m not exaggerating. Ask the average churchgoer why they believe the resurrection actually happened. Ask them how we know the Gospels are reliable. Ask them to respond to the claim that Jesus never claimed to be God. You’ll get blank stares. Mumbled responses about faith. Maybe a “the Bible says so” that doesn’t actually answer the question.

Sam, isn’t faith enough?

Faith is essential. But faith isn’t blind. The Bible never asks us to believe without evidence. It presents historical claims, eyewitness testimony, fulfilled prophecy, and logical arguments. Peter didn’t say “just believe harder.” He said “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).

Most Christians can’t do that. And it’s not entirely their fault.

They’ve been spoonfed. Week after week, sitting in megachurches with superstar pastors who preach fifteen-minute motivational talks dressed up as sermons. Lights, fog machines, worship bands that sound like concerts. Everything designed to make you feel something. Nothing designed to make you think.

These milky churches produce milky Christians. People who know they believe in Jesus but couldn’t tell you why. People who crumble the first time a coworker or professor or internet atheist pushes back with an actual argument.

I built apologetics into Scriptured because I’m tired of watching Christians lose intellectual battles they should be winning. The evidence is on our side. The logic is on our side. The history is on our side. But if nobody teaches the sheep how to defend themselves, they get devoured.

The world is getting darker. The voices speaking truth are being silenced, one way or another. Those of us who remain need to be ready. Not just to believe, but to explain. Not just to have faith, but to defend it. Fill in the gap.

That’s why apologetics isn’t some optional add-on feature in Scriptured. It’s central to the whole mission.

Moving back to something a bit lighter…

Scripture hover tooltips.

It sounds simple. You hover over a Bible reference, a little popover appears with the verse text. Easy, right?

Wrong.

Do you have any idea how many ways people write Bible references? I didn’t either until I tried to build a system that catches all of them.

There’s the obvious stuff: “John 3:16.” Then there’s abbreviations: “Jn 3:16.” Verse ranges: “John 3:16-17.” Numbered books: “1 John 3:16.” Chapters: “1 John 3.” Multiple verses: “John 3:16, 18, 21.”

And that’s before you get into the really fun edge cases. What about “1-2 Corinthians”? Or “Psalm 23” versus “Psalms 23”? Or verses that span chapters?

Then I had to cache the verse lookups so the app wouldn’t hammer the Bible API every time someone hovered over a reference. Then I had to make it work on mobile where there’s no hover, only taps. Then I had to make sure it was accessible for screen readers.

But when I finally got it working… man. Hovering over “Romans 8:28” and instantly seeing “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” without clicking anything? That’s the kind of friction removal that makes you actually engage with cross-references instead of skipping them.

The Apologetics Rabbit Hole

I don’t just want people to read the Bible. I wanted them to understand it. And more than that, I wanted them to be able to defend it.

We live in an age where people will confidently tell you the Bible is full of contradictions, that Jesus never claimed to be God, that the resurrection is just mythology, that Christianity is no different from any other religion.

Most Christians don’t know how to respond to any of that. Not because the answers don’t exist, but because nobody taught them.

So I built out apologetics content. Common questions and objections with well-researched answers. Who wrote the Gospels? Why should we trust the Bible? How do we know Jesus rose from the dead? What about the problem of evil?

Do Betters

I’m not going to pretend 2025 was all victories with building this thing.

There were moments I wanted to quit. Moments where the codebase felt like a Jenga tower one wrong move away from collapse. Moments where I’d fix one bug and create three more.

There was the time the database crashed and I had to rebuild my local development environment from scratch. Taught me the importance of backups. Trying to figure out how to publish things through Coolify. Setting up an LLC and Stripe.

There were the times I’d look at my reading plan progress in my own app and realize I’d fallen behind. The irony was not lost on me.

Sam, you’re building a Bible reading app and you can’t even keep up with your own reading plan?

Yep. Welcome to my life.

But those low points taught me something important. The app isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s supposed to help people make progress. And progress isn’t a straight line. It’s two steps forward, one step back, sometimes three steps back, then four steps forward.

That’s true for reading the Bible. It’s true for building software. It’s true for life. Ideally though… as we grow closer and closer to the Lord, we spend less time falling away and more time drawing near.

What I Actually Learned

Building Scriptured taught me things about myself that have nothing to do with code.

I learned the difference between perfect and done. There are features I wanted to build that didn’t make it in. There are things I’d do differently if I started over. But shipping something that works is infinitely better than polishing something that never launches.

I learned that conviction matters. I genuinely believe people need to read their Bibles more. I genuinely believe apologetics is important. That conviction carried me through the hard parts where pure discipline would have given out.

I learned that solo projects are lonely. There’s no team to bounce ideas off. No code reviews. No one to share the wins or commiserate about the losses. Just you and your codebase at midnight, hoping you didn’t break something.

What’s Next

Scriptured isn’t done. Software is never done.

There’s a roadmap of features I want to build. Verse comparison so you can see multiple translations side-by-side. Audio playback for verses. Community prayer features. More apologetics content. Better memorization tools. Church integration for group reading plans.

I’m not sure I’ll spend all of 2026 on it the way I spent 2025. That pace isn’t sustainable long-term. But I’ll keep building. Keep improving. Keep trying to make it easier for people to actually engage with Scripture.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading about my weird little obsession project.

And if you want to try it, go check out scriptured.app . It’s free to sign up. Read your Bible. Build a streak. Learn to defend your faith.

I won’t pretend it’s the only way to study Scripture. It’s just the way I wish had existed when I was struggling to stay consistent.

Now it does.

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