About Plain Scripture and how we choose verses

Plain Scripture is an independent iPhone app that shows one Bible verse a day on the Home Screen and Lock Screen, in seven Bibles and six languages, with no ads, no subscription and no account. This page explains how its verses are chosen, how every page on this site is checked, which Bible texts it quotes, and how to report a mistake.

What Plain Scripture is

An iPhone app that does one thing: it puts one Bible verse a day where you will see it — the Lock Screen, the Home Screen, StandBy at night. The whole Bible is in the app, in seven translations, and it works offline. There are no ads, no subscription and no account, and the App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.

How the verses are chosen

The verse of the day is not picked by an algorithm that learns what you click. It comes from a fixed list:

1. 2,188 candidate verses were gathered for forty readings — anxiety, grief, hope, strength, gratitude and others.
2. Each one was read in its context and kept only if it passed eight tests: it speaks to the reader rather than reporting someone else's state; it is a whole thought on its own, with no dangling “therefore” or “them”; it is not a curse, woe or threat; it is not the speech of a character the book shows to be wrong; it is safe for someone who opens that reading in that state — a grieving reader is never told grief is a lack of blessing; it does not rebuke the reader for that state; a lament stays only if it turns to God; and no reading carries the same sentence twice.
3. 496 verses were kept across the forty readings. Of those, 495 are in the verse-of-the-day list (Psalm verses whose first line is a heading, such as “A Psalm of David”, are left out, because a heading is not Scripture text to read on a Lock Screen).
4. The order of the 495 is shuffled once per cycle, the same way for everyone. Each verse comes up once in every 495 days, and everyone reading on the same day sees the same verse — on the site and in the app.

How the pages on this site are checked

• Every quotation is generated, not typed. The site's pages are built from the app's own Bible files, so a verse cannot be misquoted by hand. A verse whose first line is a Psalm heading is refused by the build.
• Every quotation in the prose is checked word for word against the same text, in the translation the page uses.
• Every claim about the app is checked against the app's code — widget names, what is free, how the verse of the day is chosen.
• Each page shows when it was reviewed. “Reviewed by Plain Scripture” means the checks above were done on that date. When a page changes, the date changes with it.
• No invented experts. Pages are signed by Plain Scripture, not by a made-up pastor or a stock photo.

The Bibles we quote

• English: King James Version (1769), public domain (Crown rights in the UK); Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
• Spanish: Reina-Valera 1909, public domain.
• Portuguese: Bíblia Livre, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
• French: Louis Segond 1910, public domain.
• German: Lutherbibel 1912, public domain.
• Russian: Synodal translation, public domain.

The texts come from the eBible.org editions. We correct only print-edition typesetting (a space before a comma, a heading run into a verse) and never change a word.

Corrections

Found a wrong word, a wrong reference or a wrong fact? Write to support@plainscripture.app or use the support page, with the page address. Thank you — it makes the next reader's page better.