Pray As You Go - Daily Prayer

New! Update to previous update: Love the new App! Happy to be using the app instead of browser. Thank you!! Update to previous review. The content is amazing. The App is literally the worst. I’ve resorted to using my browser to access because the app is just that bad. I honestly don’t understand whyyyy when I press the text option (to be able to read the words to the prayer) the screen still shows all of the menu options and play options. This real estate should be filled with the prayer text only. There should be a back/return button to access menu or a very small icon to return to the menu options. I’m shocked that with all of the updates since the creation of the revamped app, this remains an issue. Beautiful new update to the app… however, I cannot find an intuitive, easy way to access the read along version of daily prayer without the “play” menu taking up most of the viewing space. It seems like one day it wasn’t but every day after I can’t get rid of it? In addition to being super distracted by all of the menu options while trying to pray, it makes it difficult to read the prayer as the prayer background is white font against light background in areas (because it’s confined to such a small area)

It’s a great app overall. I’m grateful for the daily devotional. But since the redesign, it can be frustrating. Whenever I open the app, it’s very slow to load. I think I need to click on the button on the first screen to proceed. We shouldn’t be taking any action in order to get to the home screen. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the process and it just takes a long time to get to the home screen. Sometimes when I open the app, it loads yesterday’s date and I cannot get to today’s devotion, even when I open the calendar and select the current date. If I select today’s date, it will result in showing today’s date, but I can’t get the today’s devotion to play. The workaround is to shut down the app and reopen it. Then it works. Finally, the design isn’t user friendly. There are a lot of features, which is great, but the user experience can use some improvement. I’m a product manager and work with UX designers to build digital products. I don’t mean to sound picky. I’m just used working with a team to build out products that make sense to end users. It looks like y’all didn’t do enough user testing to work out all of the major bugs before releasing the latest design. I’m looking at your most recent reviews, I’m not alone in the frustration. Thanks for listening!

I have used Pray as You Go as part of my morning prayers for a couple of years, and I love it. The musical introduction and the contemplative reading and meditation on scripture encourage focus and listening as part of prayer, and that has been very helpful, especially as I was raised in a religious tradition that saw prayer mainly as a way of talking to God and telling him what you think should be done. From reading scripture, I knew that wasn’t all there was to prayer, so I turned to apps such as this one, Divine Office, and the Centering Prayer app in order to learn and grow. As the range of comments indicate, this app is scripture-focused and can be used by people from many faith backgrounds. The app is also beautiful. I enjoy the various scenic backgrounds that have shown up in this year’s update, especially those that depict light, a long view, or nature. It would be nice to be able to mark favorites so that they would show up more often. I don’t usually follow along with the text, but like to refer to it occasionally, though it has recently gotten a bit too light for me to easily see. I am grateful to the Jesuits for their work.