YouVersion Celebrates Historic Milestone of 1 Billion Downloads

YouVersion has achieved the historic milestone of 1 billion downloads across its family of apps. The company announced the news in late October, and on the evening of Monday, Nov. 17, YouVersion will celebrate the achievement with a livestream featuring artists and speakers including Craig Groeschel, CeCe Winans, and Lauren Daigle.

“I never imagined God was going to do this with it,” said YouVersion founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald in an August interview with ChurchLeaders about the upcoming milestone. “And it’s obviously a God story and something that he’s done. And we’ve just been privileged and humbled to be a part of it.”

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Bobby Gruenewald first had the idea that led to the YouVersion Bible app while standing in an airport security line in the Chicago O’Hare Airport in October 2006. “For whatever reason that day,” he said, “I was thinking about this question: I wonder if there’s a way to use technology to help me read the Bible more consistently?”

Gruenewald decided to launch a website. However, the website ended up not “capturing engagement the way that we hoped and thought that it could.” The team decided to make the Bible viewable on BlackBerries and subsequently saw engagement go up.

When Steve Jobs announced a new App Store coming to the iPhone in 2008, the team decided to build a Bible app. The YouVersion Bible app was one of the first free apps available in the new App Store.

“That very first weekend, we saw 83,000 people install [the Bible app] on their iPhone,” said Gruenewald. “And for us, that number just kind of blew our minds. We had no idea that that result would happen that quickly.”

Now, incredibly, YouVersion has reached 1 billion downloads a mere four years after reaching its first half billion.

“It’s been an incredible journey that God has had us on with this huge coalition of partners from around the globe—pastors, church leaders, Bible societies, publishers, influencers—just people of all sorts,” Gruenewald said, “that are passionate about the Bible, that have come together to provide content and Bible translations and all the things that are necessary to make it possible for us to do what we do.”

In an announcement about the achievement of 1 billion downloads, YouVersion said, “This milestone comes during a record-breaking year for Bible engagement, with YouVersion global app installs up more than 12% year-over-year and daily usage growing even faster, with an 18% increase compared to last year.”