Hallow

[slogen51]

It is that time of the year

I am definitely out of touch - A religious app - who needs to go to Church?

From the Telegraph :-

The first of the Glorious Mysteries is the Resurrection. The second is the Ascension. The third is the Descent of the Holy Spirit. The fourth is the Assumption, the fifth is the Coronation. A sixth mystery could be added to that list: how Hallow, a Catholic prayer app, became – even if just briefly – the most downloaded app in the world.

the app has been downloaded 23 million times, is available in eight languages, and claims to have more than half a million users in the UK. It costs $69.99 per year, or $6 per month (roughly £5 per month in the UK), although some of its content is available free. Jones is fighting what he refers to as “over-regulation” threatening to shut down Hallow in the European Union. The app has already been banned outright in China.


It’s a difficult one, and we don’t know all of the details,” says Jones, claiming that “in the EU, you can still download it, we just can’t market it” – a limit that is “being applied across the board to faith-based apps or any religious apps in the EU, It’s not an easy regulatory environment to navigate”.

Hallow’s users are fairly evenly split across age groups, Jones says: roughly a third under 35 years old, a third aged 35-55, and a third aged 55-plus. The slick interface of a social media app and the millennia-old wisdom of contemplative Christianity are unlikely bedfellows, but it seems to work. Even more curiously, only roughly half of its users are Catholic. The other half, Jones explains, are from other Christian denominations, other faiths, or none.

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“It is certainly focused on people who are interested in Christian spirituality, as everything on the app is about Jesus,” he says. “But one of the beautiful things about this faith is that it has all these ways of re-engaging you.” In other words, the app is built primarily for people like Jones: the lapsed and the lost. “The core of Hallow’s mission is to reach out to the folks who have most fallen away, and the people who are in the darkest places,” he says. “To do that, you have to reach out to them where they are. And where they are is scrolling on their phones.”

The app’s three co-founders – Jones, Alessandro DiSanto and Erich Kerekes – were named in Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in 2022. Last year, after advertising during American football’s showpiece Super Bowl, Hallow reached number one in the Apple App Store, briefly surpassing the likes of Google, Netflix and every social media giant – the only religious app ever to have done so. At the time of writing, 897,783,519 prayers have been prayed with Hallow – a number that ticks up and up as the seconds pass. By the time you read this, it will be higher still.

Credit Daily Telegraph