Echo Prayer

I’ve recently felt convicted that there are important people and circumstances in my life for whom and for which I am called to cover in prayer. My problem is I don’t remember very often to to stop and pray. I say I’ve been praying for God to move in these areas, but do I really? I think about them. I wish they would be healed or redeemed, but do I really often take time to pray? Enter this app. It was so helpful to me to even add the prayer. It forced me to be still and take time listening to God about what the need really is and to articulate it. Then the reminders. I was able to be thoughtful about times that are often transitional times between scheduled commitments. Those times would usually be filled with planning for the next thing, but with the reminder popping up on my phone, I remember to just be still and commune with God in prayer. And not just that, but to be in prayer over these specific things I know He wants me to bring to Him all day every day. I’m so thankful and pray this will help me to be less impulsive and self-centered in my prayers and really leave things at the feet of Christ and wait for the Holy Spirit to move.

Update: I e-mailed my suggestions to the Echo support team and they were very responsive and eager to receive them. —— I am a church planter serving overseas. I love this app’s simple appearance and typeface/color scheme. The group features are good too; I’ve gladly signed up for the subscription to be able to create feeds and groups. The social prayer aspect is really quite incredible and helpful. I love that it mostly stays out of your face so you can focus on praying. It’s a great addition to our usual e-mail updates, which can be overwhelming for our supporters; Echo provides an easy way to get reminded and updated about prayer requests. That being said, there could be improvements in the UI. It’s either not intuitive as others have said, or it takes too long to accomplish a task. One example is creating a prayer. There needs to be a hashtag button that makes it easy to add one and to access existing hashtags. When praying, swipe gestures would make sense for editing; or at least, I should be able to edit or mark the prayer more quickly with fewer taps. It’d be nice also to have a feature to add contact info to each prayer request. I’d like to be able to reach out via email or social media app or phone to connect with somebody I’m praying for without needing to exit the app. But these are all minor; overall it’s a great experience!

We’ve been using the app for our small group for about a month now and we all love that we can easily message and pray for each other without having a group text. However the app has been super glitchy. I just had to delete and re-download and found out the prayer request I added yesterday never even added. It’s also been notifying everyone in the group when one particular prayer has been prayed for and we can’t figure out why. It was a little difficult to figure out how to navigate initially, the opening tutorials on use are not very thorough and we accidentally kept “answering” prayer requests instead of just praying for people. The fact that there are a lot of hidden buttons that don’t show up unless you tap the screen gets confusing because there were several times I got into a prayer request and couldn’t figure out how to get out. After using it for a month, the usability is better, although we’re still trying to figure it all out. It would also be nice if in the group prayer board it would list who posted the prayer on the title. Right now we have several that just say “mom” and you have to click on each one to see who posted it. We can have people re-label them, but it would be just as easy to have the poster listed on the list as well. 3 stars due to glitching and difficulty figuring out how to use it.