Does It Matter Where Your Bible App Comes From?

DumpsterTrevor McKendrick is an atheist who wrote one of the top-selling Bible apps for iOS. A former Mormon, McKendrick saw an unserved niche market on the App Store and created a Spanish audio Bible to fill it. Now he’s banking over $100,000 per year selling the app. He compares the Bible to Harry Potter and describes Christians as people who learn the spells in the book and try to use them to heal their children. He compares them to people who teach The Lord of the Rings as real history.

Does it make any difference whether or not the people who create the products you use for Bible study agree with the materials they publish?

When I started writing Bible software in 1988 there were very few other products on the market. I purchased the King James Bible from Public Brand Software, a distributor of freeware and shareware programs for MS-DOS. While browsing their catalog (paper catalog — this was before the Web) I saw a Bible program called WordWorker and picked up a copy of that, too.

WordWorker was pretty impressive compared to other programs available at the time. My problem with it was that the programmer who wrote it was associated with The Way International, which denies key teachings of historic Christianity and adds a few of their own. They encourage severing ties with family and friends and living with other “believers” instead, which many argue qualifies them as a “cult”.

Coincidentally I had been unsuccessfully recruited by a member of The Way while in college. Noticing a strange-looking guy observing me playing pinball at the student union, I struck up a conversation and bought him a couple games (he had never played pinball). He invited me to join his “twig fellowship”. As a brand new Christian with very little foundation in the Bible, I struggled with figuring out if this was God’s direction or not. Fortunately I dodged that bullet, and got involved with a local church that had a strong emphasis on the Bible and Bible study, which is what eventually led me into developing Bible software.

It was difficult to get excited about using WordWorker because I felt like I was supporting a cult. Even if it coincidentally met my needs, it was hard to recommend to others or even use enthusiastically because I knew where it came from. One benefit of using Bible software that comes from a person with whom you share a common faith is that you don’t have to feel guilty about supporting something with which you disagree. You and I may not agree on every fine point of doctrine, and we may not share a common worship style preference, but I bet we’re closer to agreeing with each other on the fundamentals of the faith than you would be with an atheist.

I originally wrote my Bible study software as a tool for myself to use. Its features were designed to meet my needs, which I obviously knew well. I didn’t have to do any research to figure out what people who read the Bible wanted; I wrote what I wanted.

I took my Bible program (QuickVerse) to Parsons Technology in 1988, where, over the next ten years, I employed a couple dozen different programmers. Not all of them were practicing Christians, but they were good programmers. Jeff Wheeler (who would later leave Parsons with me to start Laridian) and I led the development of the program. Both of us were Bible-believing Christians who were not just developers, but users of the program.

Having real Christians write your Bible study app guarantees that it is designed to meet the needs of someone who really studies the Bible.

Parsons Technology was not a “Christian company”. It was a plain-old software company that happened to have a Church Software Division that published church management and Bible study software. Parsons was eventually purchased by Intuit (1994), which sold us to Broderbund (1997), which was purchased by The Learning Company (1998), which was purchased by Mattel (1999), which sold the Church Software Division to a dormant company that was rumored to have previously been a booking agency for Las Vegas acts (2000). During those years we were faced with a number of demands from our pagan overlords that compromised the quality of QuickVerse. They saw “unserved niches” on store shelves and wanted us to create products that were just old versions of QuickVerse with a new cover. They weren’t interested in meeting needs, but in making money.

This was the final straw for me. When it got to where creating Bible software was about duping people into buying old versions of our program at a cheap price because BestBuy or Costco was looking for 25-cent CD-ROMs to fill an end-cap, I bailed out and started Laridian in 1998.

Our goal has always been to focus on our customers and our product, not on creating a company to sell to the highest bidder. The features and reference materials you see in PocketBible come from customer feedback (and from our own needs as our product’s first customers). We bristle at doing things like renaming our product “@Bible” so that it pops up first in alphabetic search results on the App Store, or calling our program “Bible App” to cause it to come up first when you do a generic search for a Bible app, or seeding the store with identical products, all with different names, so it appears more often in your search results. This is what marketeers do to trick people into buying shoddy products. We aim for letting the quality and usability of our apps speak for themselves.

So another benefit of having real Christians write your Bible study app is that they’re not just seeing you as a rube who will spend their hard-earned money on a quickly thrown-together, shallow product, but rather they are committed to creating not just one download but an ecosystem of products that will meet your Bible study needs not only today, but for years to come.

I don’t have a doctrinal test for people with whom I do business, but I expect my Bible study materials to come from people who are as firmly committed to the Bible as I am. It’s not that they’re the only ones who I can trust to create useful products, but it is at least more likely that they’re doing a better job.

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Doug
Doug
9 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. So many good points and insights.

Randy Herold
Randy Herold
9 years ago

I apprecite your integrity.

godprayser
godprayser
9 years ago

Eph 2:10

John Coarsey
John Coarsey
9 years ago

Laridian is all I use now. Have it on iPad, iPhone, Macbook Air and Imac. Awesome. Appreciate your integrity.

Joyce Heffern
Joyce Heffern
9 years ago

thank you for sharing…I would be lost without your site… Been using it for at least 15 Years…been through 3 iPods with it!!! GOD BLESS YOU ALL…

Steve
Steve
9 years ago

Good story. I bought my first Pocket Bible from you on a CD. The internet was very young and I had little more than email. The NIV set I purchased was formatted for Palm. Still one of your most devoted customers.

Bill
9 years ago

Thank you for sharing the back story. I used QV from the early, early days, but left it about the time Broderbund came on the scene. Your story explains why I left. I was excited to see PocketBible for the MAC. I am enjoying it, and truly appreciate it because of your faithfulness to the Word.

Peter
Peter
9 years ago

Great job Craig & Laridian. I have no regret using the software that you have built based on your experience using a physical bible. I have followed your product since 2004 and really appreciate the ability of able to upgrade as time goes as hardware (Palm, Win Mob, Win Phone, webOS, iOS and Android) goes obsolete pretty fast. Whenever I see any Christian using generic reader, I will recommend Laridian to them. Keep up the good work.

Wayne
Wayne
9 years ago

Excellent background, thanks for sharing. I’ve been using PB for WM since about 2001 and have an extensive library and personal notes. Nothing matches the power of PB for WM, but Android is getting close. I have now just switched from my WM device to Android. Looking forward to the continued updates/improvements. Thanks for a great product.

Ken Philpott
Ken Philpott
9 years ago

Great article Craig. You’ve made some very good points. I love PocketBible. I use it as my only study resource, since purchasing it around 15 years ago. I’ve even done some beta testing which was a great experience, thanks Craig.
Verse notes, journal notes, and highlighting have become such a important part of how I use PB recently. I originally bought full versions of Logos and WordSearch, but once I started to use PocketBible, I found it much easier, quicker and productive to use for Bible study. It’s so intuitive, I can remember how to do everything in the program without having to look up a manual. Thanks Craig
Regards Ken

Matt G
Matt G
9 years ago

Nicely put, a QV sales rep said I could give away my old version QV 8 to another individual who did not own a package, yet another rep told me I would be unable to use my new software since I gave the old one away. Thankfully I found another reputable software company writen and staffed by believers. I was a Laridian customer throughout the Palm and Windows Mobile 5,6.x years and invested in a library, and enjoyed it thoroughly. You were hesitant to fully jump into the new windows phone platform and that was a good business decision and it is interesting to see how individuals “spin” history to appear more favorable in their own eyes

Chris Hall
Chris Hall
9 years ago

Great article Craig, it sums up why I recently purchased PocketBible. I’d been looking at a few Bible apps and reading your blog and the background to Laridian swung it for me!

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