The Archdiocese of St. Louis was the first Catholic diocese in the US to have a dedicated iPhone app to promote the diocese's parishes, news, and a community of prayer. When I was working in the Archdiocese's Office of Web Development, I noticed that many people were beginning to use iPhones and other smartphones as their primary means to keep discover businesses, keep in touch, and even browse the web.
I decided to start work on the Catholic STL app after finishing work on moving the Archdiocesan website to Drupal. Since the website was all integrated and running on Drupal, I could easily pull data from the website and let mobile users have easy access to news, parish location and event information, and prayer information.
After a few months of work (mostly done through donated time on nights and weekends from Midwestern Mac, LLC), I finally released Catholic STL, version 1.0 in March 2011. Within a month, there were over 3,000 downloads, and the app continues to see a few new downloads per day over a year later!
The app was the basis for the Catholic Diocese App, which I ported to Android in 2012, and is used to power apps for other dioceses and large Catholic organizations.
- Designed for iOS devices.
- Written in native Objective-C.
- Precursor to open source Catholic Diocese App.