Intro
As we look back and reflect on our ministry during 2024, it feels like we have really seen God's gracious hand at work this year. Three particular "pillars" stand out as the highlights of this year:
- We have been completely rewriting the internals of the PrayerMate app from the ground up, building a secure foundation for future development, and primarily motivated by wanting to make sure that syncing your data between devices is rock solid and reliable. This has meant pain-stakingly rewriting every single piece of functionality - and though we're not there yet, we have been quickly narrowing the gap. So far we have been testing with more than 40 beta testers, and the feedback so far is very encouraging.
- We have continued development of our ambitious Bible overview mobile game project, The Serpent & The Seed. The final pieces of artwork are being drawn, the last bits of music have been written, and we've now sent out invites to over 100 beta testers to try out Act 1 of the game.
- Both of these have been made possible by the way that the PrayerMate community really rallied behind us to partner financially with us this year - and we are so grateful for the 130+ new monthly givers who have signed up to support us, plus countless others who have made one-off donations. We are still very reliant on one-off giving, and are facing a shortfall of several thousands of pounds. But nonetheless this was truly transformative for us as a charity, and has really spurred us on as we continue investing in making PrayerMate the best app it can be.
God-willing, it means that 2025 is shaping up to be a very exciting year, as we hopefully launch both the new PrayerMate and The Serpent & The Seed to the public. Once it's live, the new PrayerMate update will make it far easier for us to add new features and platforms (we hear you, all of you asking for a way to use it on your desktop / laptop!) and we can't wait to see where it leads. We also hope and pray that the game project will touch many lives and help them to encounter Jesus.
Stats
It isn't all about the numbers, but they are important for demonstrating the way that PrayerMate continues to make an impact:
In 2024, PrayerMate had well over 47k downloads, meaning we passed the 600k total downloads mark for the first time!
136k people used the app over the course of the year, and around 31k per month by December.
A whopping 18.8 million items were prayed for so far this year - that's 1.6 millon per month!
As ever, it is such an encouragement to imagine what God is doing in answer to all of these prayers!
The New PrayerMate
The PrayerMate app is now approaching 14 years old - if you can believe it, Apple was still on iOS 3 when it was first started - and the data syncing architecture was created eight years ago when our founder Andy Geers first went full time on the app. During that time, a lot has changed in the world of technology, and user expectations have evolved. Whilst we did a major redesign project of the user interface recently, the underlying database layer and code was still the old native apps, parts of which date right back to those early years. So it was long overdue an upgrade!
Our developer Josh has been hard at work since August 2023 painstakingly rebuilding every single feature to work on a new, upgraded data syncing architecture, built on top of something called PowerSync. Several beta testers have been using this as their main PrayerMate app for almost a year now, and it seems to be a lot more reliable. It will also make it much easier and faster to build new functionality in the future. But there is still a few key bits of functionality that still need to be added to the new version before we can roll it out more widely - most notably groups and secure feeds.
If you are one of the small minority of users who has opted to remain using our old legacy user interface then we must warn you that we will no longer be able to offer this option once the new version rolls out. We hope you will understand that this change has been necessary in order to offer a reliable service to everyone. If you have not seen it already, we have produced a walkthrough video explaining how to use the more modern interface, and we hope that you will be able to make the change soon.
This major undertaking has been made possible in no small part due to user donations - so thank you to everyone who has supported us month by month.
Advent 2024
This year we hosted 8 different daily Advent devotionals in the app, including new content from the LICC, Langham Partnership and Tearfund. Our own "Waiting for Jesus" feed from 2022 had over 900 subscribers again this year - and we hope and pray that all of these feeds were a blessing to those who used them.
If you follow us on Instagram or Facebook then you may also have seen our "Advent Alphabet", created by the wonderful Tyler!
Lent: Praying the Psalms
During Lent we also had a range of daily devotionals, and over 600 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 14-60.
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. It is so encouraging to see how the project has come together over the course of this year, as we said above. Do get in touch if you want to be included in the beta and get early access to Act 1!
Here's an end-of-year devlog video to give you a flavour of the progress that we've made:
PocketGamer and WASD
One of the real highlights of 2024 has been taking a demo of The Serpent & The Seed to two secular gaming conferences: PocketGamer Connects London and WASD (part of the London Games Festival). Our heart for this project has always been that it would be something that would connect with a non-Christian audience and help them to engage with the Bible, so it was thrilling for us to be able to get out there and get the game in front of people and see how they reacted - and we are so pleased that people loved it! (see Andy's PocketGamer and WASD devlog videos for more details).
We are lining up several conferences to exhibit at in 2025 once the game is complete too, so we're really looking forward to that.
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 our other projects. If you exclude money that was specific to the game project, here's a quick overview of 2024 so far:
- Around 77% of our income came from user donations/in-app patrons
- £86.9k donations
- 184 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 released publicly 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
As ever, 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 can't wait to see where God takes us 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)