Intro
At this time of year we love to take the opportunity to look back and reflect on all that God has done over the past year in the life of PrayerMate and us here at Discipleship Tech. As ever, it has been such a blessing and a privilege for us to get to serve this amazing community, and we always love hearing from you with your feedback and encouragement. What follows here is a just a few of the highlights of 2023.
Stats
It isn't all about the numbers, but they serve as a helpful indication of how PrayerMate continues to meet a need:
In 2023, PrayerMate had almost 47k downloads (that's 7k more than last year), taking it up to a total of 575k downloads
133k people used the app over the course of the year, and around 31k per month by December.
A whopping 17.8 million items were prayed for so far this year - that's 1.54 millon per month from January-November.
With so much heartache and brokenness in our world at this time, it is encouraging to know that God's people are on their knees praying to a God who loves to hear from his children.
Rolling out PrayerMate's New Design
In many ways, the bulk of our work on PrayerMate this year has been consolidating the new design, fixing issues, making improvements in response to your feedback, before ultimately reaching the point where we were able to make it the default interface for all English-speaking users. We know that change isn't always easy for people, but on the whole the feedback has been immensely positive, and we've heard from many people who have got back in to using PrayerMate as a result of the new interface. We especially loved this bit of recent feedback from a reluctant convert:
"I thank God for you all as I love PrayerMate so much. It is my go-to mate early every morning. I have to confess that I resisted your update until recently as I could not bear the thought of ruining my prayer time with change! When you took over and changed it, I gulped, and in prayer started to get used to using it. Now I really do love all your work in putting it together, it is just excellent, how slow and unadventurous I was in not starting your update earlier."
We also loved this bit of feedback, because it shows how the work that we do isn't just about writing code, but ultimately is helping people to connect with God:
"I thought about cancelling my subscription because I didn't use PrayerMate for about one year (due to changes in my daily routine), but when I changed to the new design, I knew that I couldn't cancel... Over the course of two weeks I fell in love with the app again, and, more importantly, I fell in deeper love with the God to whom you helped me pray more repeatedly again."
What an encouragement to us!
If you still haven't got going with the new design, here's a video we made last year outlining the main changes:
Many thanks again to our developer Josh for spearheading this project, and for all his hard work and perseverance to get it live. Josh's hard work has been made possible in no small part due to user donations - so thank you too to everyone who has supported us month by month.
Improved Tablet Support
One of the improvements Josh has been able to make to the new design this year is improved support for tablets - so if you tried the new interface last year on a tablet and didn't stick, do give it another try in the latest version and see if it helps.
New Scheduling Overview Page
One of our most asked-for feature requests over the years has been some kind of "scheduling overview" page, where you can see at a glance all of your settings. Earlier this year Josh was able to add this, available from the "Settings" page:
Classic "Orange" Colour Scheme Option
Many of you heaved a sigh of relief that the new interface was decidedly less orange than the old app - but a few of you expressed some disappointment about this. So as a special Christmas gift to you, Josh has added back a special options in the settings menu to enable more vibrant colours during prayer sessions in this week's app update (available now on Android and hopefully on iOS by Christmas):
Advent 2023
This year we hosted 9 different daily Advent devotionals in the app, including new content from Tearfund, Langham Partnership and Crosslinks. Our own "Waiting for Jesus" feed from last year had almost 900 subscribers again this year - and we hope and pray that all of these feeds were a blessing to those who used them.
Lent: Praying the Psalms
During Lent we also had a range of daily devotionals, and 850 people joined in with our daily "Praying the Psalms through Lent" feed, including a few questions for reflection and a short prayer each day as we worked together through Psalms 112-150 and 1-9.
Word Alive
A real highlight of the year was attending the Word Alive conference in Prestatyn, North Wales, and running a Discipleship Tech exhibition stall there. It was wonderful to meet with some of our users and connect with many new faces too. We especially loved getting to introduce people to our latest project, The Serpent & The Seed, and a newly revised Redeeming Time app (more on both of those later!)
We're all really sad that Word Alive has had to be cancelled for 2024 due to the sudden closure of Pontins Prestatyn - but are very grateful for the memories!
Kingdom Code BUILD
In October, once again we attended the Kingdom Code BUILD Christian hackathon weekend in London.
Our aim this year was to try and prototype a totally new architecture for syncing data between devices, to try and address some long-standing unreliability and performance issues. Getting ready for this event was a fantastic motivation for us to finally grapple with this problem and lay down some foundations, and the weekend itself was a good opportunity to explore the problem further.
Work in Progress: New Sync Architecture
In the months since Kingdom Code BUILD, Josh has been hard at work, taking the basic concepts we explored at the hackathon and fleshing out the details. It means rewriting every single one of PrayerMate's functions and features one by one in the new paradigm, and is a substantial piece of work. But it has been great working with James Doc to help project manage, and we have been able to break it down into discreet pieces of work that can be done week by week. Josh already has a prototype up and running with basic prayer sessions and feeds, and after Christmas will be able to carry on implementing other features such as images and other attachments, notications and reminders, downloadable prayer packs, and groups, just to name a few.
When the time comes, we may send a call out for volunteers who are not afraid to try something experimental, for whom syncing between devices is a major priority (over and above other functionality which may or may not be ready yet).
Once again, this is a massive project, and we are very grateful to Josh for his courage in tackling this - only made possible by your donations.
Redeeming Time v3
One of the things we were able to demonstrate at Word Alive was our newly revamped Redeeming Time app. Redeeming Time is a simple app that was inspired by a blog post by Crossway, titled "You probably have more time for reading the Bible than you think". It was based around two infographics: one that shared which books of the Bible could be read through in a single sitting if you had X minutes spare (which was the premise of v1 of Redeeming Time). But the other infographic was about how long it would take you to read different bits of the Bible if you read for X minutes every day, not just as a one-off, and it was this second aspect that formed the basis of our newly revamped app. There is now an additional tab on the app which keeps track of books of the Bible that you have started reading, and approximately how many days it would take you to finish them off if you kept reading a few minutes each day.
We have been so amazed at the response from Redeeming Time's small but passionate user base - people seem to really love this app! This was our favourite piece of feedback we received this year:
"This is a really great app, thank you for making this :-) It has become part of my everyday life, and has helped me get back into the Word of God again."
The Serpent & The Seed
Something that's been especially encouraging this year has been the amazing progress made on our other project, The Serpent & The Seed. This is intended for a rather different audience to PrayerMate, intended to engage people who would never normally open a Bible and help them discover God's big plan of salvation. All year we've had the privilege of working with an artist, Greg Clifton, who has made the game look gorgeous, as well as some beautiful lettering from Sophie Killingley, and more amazing music and songs from Poor Bishop Hooper (and even a track by a Canadian musician called Jim Guthrie, who most of you will never have heard of, but for the approximately two people reading this who have will make them very excited). It is shaping up to be something truly special, and we have been so encouraged seeing people's response to it when demonstrating what we've done so far at occasions like Word Alive and the Christian Game Developers Conference in California.
Here's an end-of-year devlog video to give you a flavour of the progress that we've made:
We are also hugely grateful to everybody who supported our crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, and those who pledged matched giving. Collectively you helped us raise over £32,000 towards the project, which has been a great blessing and allowed us to crack on with building it without having to stress about how to fund it. Thank you!
Financial Giving
All of the above has only been made possible because of the generous support of so many backers who have financially supported Discipleship Tech as we work on PrayerMate and these other projects. If you exclude money that was specific to the game project, here's a quick overview of 2023 so far:
- Around 66% of our income came from user donations/in-app patrons
- £51.4k donations
- 121 regular monthly donors (e.g. PayPal/Stewardship/Patreon/Stripe) PLUS in-app patrons
Your donations have directly supported a second developer on the team, helping us to continue to invest in making improvements to PrayerMate. God-willing, we will be able to get the newly rearchitected sync project ready for testing next year, laying foundations that allow further improvements to the app and other new features. If you are able to consider making a regular monthly donation, or one off, please go to our website for details of how to set one up.
Conclusion
We thank God so much for each and every person who has used our apps and donated towards our ministry, and for all of your messages and support. You are truly what makes this all worth it, and we look forward to continuing to serve you all in the year ahead.
Keep praying,
Andy Geers
Discipleship Tech CEO
PrayerMate is a free app to help you be consistent in prayer. It is a ministry of Discipleship Tech, a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, Registered as a Charity in England and Wales (No: 1178838)