This is How to Drive Demand for The Oldest Book in the World
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Meta's New Battle. Check out the full article for more insights.
If you've been watching the top charts lately, you may have noticed an unlikely app at the top: Bible Chat. Religious apps aren't common at the top of the charts, making this a solid win for Bible Chat.
How many people are downloading the app? Are they paying? And above all, how's this happening?
Let's start with the downloads. According to Appfigures Intelligence, Bible Chat's downloads have doubled this year and nearly 10xd since the beginning of 2024. In more absolute terms, the app was downloaded 1.5M times in March, the most downloads it's ever seen in a single month.
You could attribute the growth in March to Lent, but I looked at growth last year and while there was a small bump between February and March of 2024, it was tiny in comparison - just 45K extra downloads.
Before we get to the how, if you aren't familiar, Bible Chat is a bible app that also lets you talk to an AI about the scripture. You might think this is a unique niche, but it isn't. According to Appfigures Explorer there are more than 9,000 bible apps on the App Store and Google Play and 46 of those make more than $10K/mo. with Bible Chat leading.
But, Are They Subscribing?
Bible Chat is currently the highest-earning bible app in the App Store and second on Google Play right now. According to our estimates, Bible Chat earned a net total of $6.3M since rolling out back in 2023. That's what Bookvitals, the app's publisher, gets to keep after Apple and Google take their fees. The majority of revenue, over 95%, came from the US App Store.
Like downloads, March was the highest month of revenue, earning Bible Chat $750K of net revenue - a 6x increase when compared to January of 2024.
The rate of growth isn't as fast as downloads, even though the app has a hard paywall with a very "convenient" Try Free button that starts a free trial, but I suspect its main dropoff is its landing UI, which confused even me. That's kind of a "good" problem to have because it means optimization could greatly propel revenue.
So, how did Bible Chat get here?
Is TikTok to Thank?
Many apps get their start on TikTok these days, so I checked Bible Chat's TikTok account and found a lot of videos. Over 500 including six with more than a million views and one with more than 60M views. But... the account hasn't posted in a few months now leading me to believe that's not what's driving demand up in March.
Bible Chat also uses Search Engine Optimization to capture traffic from Google and drive it toward its app. Content is still king in 2025 and it's one of the best strategies for apps to get traffic outside of the store for free.
But that's not all...
Our Apple Ads Intelligence shows that Bible Chat is using Apple Ads more than most of its competitors. The app is spending on nearly 2,000 keywords in the US App Store, more than double the competition! It's also running big campaigns in other English-speaking countries like Australia and Canada and in non-English-speaking countries.
This isn't super common, but it's a great way to get market share in less competitive (and less expensive) geographies.
This is the kind of strategy you want to steal.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
