Scripture Earth App

    Chris and his colleagues have been working on Scripture App Builder (SAB) since before its first release in 2015. SAB has been used to create thousands of contextualized Bible apps by many organizations. In 2017, SAB 3.3 added support for building apps on macOS and creating iOS apps. There are many Android apps that have been published to Google Play. However, there have been quite a bit fewer iOS apps published to the Apple App Store created with SAB (some examples: Sylheti, Pertukekem, Dari, Northern Thai, Hindi, and Chin). This is due to Apple rejecting apps if there were too many from the same developer account. As a solution, Apple told publishers to create a single container app that would allow the user to select the content.
    This year, with SAB 9.0, we have enabled our partners to create an iOS container app as Apple has recommended. An organization can take their projects for Android, make a few changes for iOS, and build packages of resources that can be downloaded by the iOS container app. When the user runs the app for the first time, they select a language, download a package of resources, and then the container app becomes like a fully contextualized Bible app for that specific language!
    We have talked with a few of our partners and they are excited about the opportunity to make their resources available on iOS. One of these partners is ScriptureEarth. They publish a website that hosts and links to Scripture resources in thousands of languages. They currently use Scriptoria (the web service that Chris works on) to publish Android Apps to Google Play and then link to the apps on their website. Scriptoria has been updated to support building the language resource packages used by the iOS container app. They will finally be able to provide an iOS app for all of these language communities.