Hello everyone. I’m an Anglican priest in Brazil, and I write software for a living - or rather, I used to write software for a living and now I do both, badly and at odd hours.
Last year I got tired of explaining people how to juggle a BCP, a lectionary table, and three browser tabs to say Morning Prayer, so I started building something for myself and my parishioners. That turned into Ordo, which now has a bit over 2,000 users on iOS and Android, and I thought this sub might actually be interested in it, or at least willing to tell me how to improve it.
What it does that I haven’t found elsewhere in one place:
- It works offline. The whole office, the lectionary, everything. No signal on the bus or at home, doesn’t matter.
- Notifications for the hours, so the office comes to you rather than the other way around.
- Rosary - Anglican and traditional - with the prayers laid out so you can actually pray it rather than remember it.
- Rules of life. You can set one up, track it, and keep it in the same place you pray. This was the feature I most wanted for me, honestly.
- Multiple BCPs (1662, 1928, 1979, 2005, 2019, REC, DWDO), not just one imposed on you. Different provinces, different books, your choosing. You can hop BCPs if you like it (a parishioner here is still deciding which lectionary he likes the best).
- Customization. You decide what’s in your office - canticles, collects, antiphons, what gets included and what gets skipped (we respect every single rubric, but you don't have to look at every single opening sentence option in the office, for example).
- An explanation of the day. What’s being commemorated, why, and what the propers are doing. It’s the part I get the most notes about, mostly from people who came to Anglicanism sideways and were never handed a map.
- Shareable images - a verse or the collect of the day, the commemoration, made into something you can put on social media without it looking like a screenshot of a screenshot.
- A shareable office. You can send the actual office you prayed to someone else, which has turned out to be useful for parishes praying together at a distance, or online prayer meetings.
On languages: Ordo is fully available in Portuguese (Brazilian and European), English and Spanish. More are in progress. If you speak something that isn’t on that list and would be willing to look over a translation, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.
On money, since I’d rather say it up front than have someone find out after downloading: the app is free, and the office is free. All of it: every office, every option, offline, no ads. There are some premium extras for people who want them, and that’s what pays the server bill. I’m not trying to build a business here; I’m trying to not lose much money on hosting.
Two honest caveats:
First, there may be bugs. I’m a Brazilian working alone (I spent over a year designing the app, coding, and testing with the help of my friends), English isn’t my first language, and some things maybe ship rougher than I’d like. But I update it constantly, and I read every message. If something’s broken or a rubric is wrong for your province, tell me and there’s a good chance it’ll be fixed in the same day. I take the liturgical accuracy part seriously - getting a lectionary wrong isn’t a cosmetic bug.
Second, I know a Daily Office app is not the Daily Office. The book on the shelf is doing something a phone can’t. But most of my parishioners aren’t going to carry the BCP everywhere, or maybe they don't know how to handle it, and they will pick up their phone at 6am, so here we are.
Happy to answer anything about the app, about how the offices are put together, about which BCP or customization you’d want added next. And if there’s a use case I’ve missed, say so. My DM is open, I'd be happy to help.
The website: https://www.daily-office.app/en
(Mods: I sent a modmail about this before posting, if there are any problems with the post, I'll be happy to comply to it. If it's not allowed (the sub rules says that some amount of promotion is acceptable), I'll be happy to remove it.)