Scriptoria 2

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Chris works on two products: Scripture App Builder (SAB) and Scriptoria. When we started developing SAB, we knew that helping organizations create contextualized Bible apps could eventually mean supporting thousands of apps. After all, there are more than 7,000 languages in the world! (Read more about apps in thousands of languages.)

Android is the primary smartphone platform for many of the communities we serve, but it changes every year. A Bible app created ten years ago still needs regular updates to keep working on the phones people use today. With thousands of apps in use, keeping them all up to date is a significant challenge.

Our first App Publishing Service focused on publishing apps through the Wycliffe USA Google Play Store. Later, we received funding to develop Scriptoria, which allows Bible translation organizations to keep their apps updated and available to their communities. This has become even more important as Google Play limits the availability of older apps on devices running newer versions of Android.

Each year, we release a new version of SAB that incorporates the latest Android libraries and other updates. All those apps need to be rebuilt and republished so that people can continue using them. Scriptoria makes that process much more manageable for the organizations responsible for these apps.

When we started Scriptoria, we didn’t have any web developers on our team, so we contracted outside developers to build it. Over time, improving Scriptoria became challenging. We needed to address some significant design flaws and performance problems, and we had learned a lot about web development while building our Scripture Progressive Web App (PWA). We decided it was time to modernize Scriptoria using the same technology stack—Svelte and DaisyUI—that we use for the PWA.

We released Scriptoria 2 at the end of 2025 (read the announcement). The new technology stack has made it much easier for us to maintain and improve the application. Since Aidan Jones joined our team, we’ve made many improvements. We also feel much more comfortable having students contribute to the project.

During the 2025–2026 school year, we worked with a Liberty University Capstone team to deliver two major improvements that we had wanted to make for years. It’s exciting to see how the new foundation is making it easier to tackle long-standing needs and continue improving Scriptoria.

Most importantly, Scriptoria is helping Bible translation organizations keep their apps up to date and available to the people who need them. Since 2019, it has been used to manage 3,255 projects, encompassing 5,999 products across 2,124 languages. During that time, those projects have resulted in 30,101 app publications.

Thank you for your support in making this work possible! Your support helps us maintain the tools that Bible translation organizations need to share God’s Word through technology.