Waves: Bible Verse
AI scripture companion matched to how you feel
An iOS app that delivers Bible verses matched to what someone is actually going through. A daily mood check-in shapes which scripture surfaces, widgets refresh through the day, and an AI chat explains verses and generates devotionals in context.
Context & role
Waves delivers Bible verses matched to what someone is actually going through. A daily mood check-in shapes which scripture surfaces; lock and home screen widgets refresh through the day; and an AI chat explains verses, generates devotionals and answers faith questions in context. It runs on a subscription with a free trial.
The problem
Devotional apps have a retention problem shaped like a calendar: a verse-of-the-day is the same verse for everyone, so it stops feeling addressed to you by roughly day four.
The product bet is that relevance beats volume: that a verse chosen for how you feel today outperforms a larger library served generically. That makes personalisation the product, not a feature of it.
Product & solution
- Built the iOS app in React Native and TypeScript
- Implemented the mood check-in slider that picks verses from a user's daily emotional state
- Built Waves Chat on OpenAI: verse explanations, personalised devotionals and open faith-based questions, with prompting tuned to stay grounded in scripture instead of freelancing
- Built lock screen and home screen widgets that refresh on a schedule, keeping content present without requiring the app to be opened
- Implemented customisable reminder notifications and devotional streak tracking
- Integrated in-app purchases and subscription management across weekly, monthly, six-month and annual tiers with a free trial
Engineering decisions
Widgets are a different execution environment. Lock and home screen widgets refresh on a schedule the OS controls, not on demand. Getting fresh, personalised content into a widget means pre-computing what it will need and respecting a tight memory and time budget. You cannot call an API when the widget wakes.
An AI that has to stay in bounds. A faith chatbot answering “what does this verse mean” has an obvious failure mode. The work was prompt design and grounding: keeping responses anchored in scripture and appropriate to a devotional context instead of free-associating, in a domain where getting it wrong genuinely matters to the person reading it.
Subscriptions across six price points. Weekly, monthly, six-month and annual tiers plus a three-day trial, with receipt validation, restore-purchase, and state that stays correct through cancellation and re-subscription.
Outcome
Waves holds a 4.8 star rating from 246 ratings on the US App Store and has shipped seven releases since launching in April 2025, including a mood check-in feature added in 2026. It is a paid product with a real subscriber base.
Visual showcase
Technologies
Results & impact
- App Store rating
4.8★
App Store rating
- Ratings
246
Ratings
- Releases shipped
7
Releases shipped