Explore App-earing Popular

If you’re a smartphone person, have you got the Explore app yet?

It’s been encouraging to see the reviews for the app, launched this week, from users. We were hoping that delivering Bible-study notes straight to people’s phones would make reading God’s word easier, quicker and more flexible—and it’s looking like it has:

“What your iPhone has been waiting for: This is a GREAT development—the iPhone is an ideal medium for getting hold of Bible-reading notes, and these are great notes. What’s not to like?”

“Explore was always great but to now have it at all times is great! No internet connection needed once downloaded and Bible passage included. Thanks team.”

It’s dead easy to get—just go here to start accessing Explore wherever you are, whenever you want!

A couple of people have asked us why, in the UK, the monthly rate for Explore on the app (£1.49) is a bit more than it is when you buy the paper version (£1.33). Which is a great question! Essentially, there are three reasons:

• Apple take 30% commission for every sale made through their App store. So every time we sell an app rather than a paper version, we actually receive less money.
• Apple insist all apps are priced at particular price points. Currently these are 69p, £1.49, £1.99 and it rises from there. So if we didn’t charge £1.49, once Apple took their share we’d be losing over 50% more.
• We do save on print and postage costs when we sell an app rather than a paper Explore—but these are a tiny part of the overall cost to us of producing Explore. The major part of the cost is in the writing, editing, laying out, proofing and design. Selling Explore as an app doesn’t cut any of these costs at all!

And as ever, any profit we do make on the app, as with the paper version, will be ploughed straight back in to developing resources for the future; with getting to you Bible-centered products which make a loss but which are vital for ministry, such as children’s Bible-study notes; and with providing virtually-free resources for to Bible teachers in the developing world who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

Your £1.49 goes quite a long way—and it’s only half the cost of a large Starbucks coffee!

If you’ve got the app already, as many of you have, do let us know what you think of it on Apple’s app store or Android’s Market.