From Sexting to Sacraments: How Mobile Apps Are Taking on Religion
At this point, our entire lives could be boiled down into a series of apps. Schedules, diets, friends, family, play—it's all there in a set of brightly colored, easy-to-digest icons that have come to define the way we see ourselves.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece extends an argument the corpus has been building since TechCrunch made the apps-are-media case at the end of 2011: the app grid isn't just a distribution format, it's a lens through which every life function gets reorganized. Since then the pattern has held — UpTo showed in July 2013 that even the calendar could be rebuilt as a social feed [[a:1199693]], and Reuters reported in April 2013 that youth messaging habits were pulling users away from Facebook itself [[a:1199093]].
What's new here is scope rather than mechanism: Gizmodo is mapping the same app-grid logic onto faith and sacrament, the last domain most people would have treated as off-limits to icon-based software. That matters because it tests whether the apps-absorb-everything thesis survives contact with institutions whose authority rests on tradition rather than convenience.
First-order effects
- Developers and publishers gain a fresh category to colonize — prayer, scripture, confession — competing directly with churches and denominations for the attention time that religious practice occupies.
- Religious institutions face the adoption-or-relevance decision that media companies confronted after 2011: meet believers inside the app grid, or cede the interface for spiritual life to third-party builders.
Second-order effects
- Expect congregations and faith organizations to respond by commissioning their own apps, the way legacy media built news apps once the app grid became the default reading surface — turning software budgets into a line item for institutions that never planned for one.
- App stores and platforms quietly acquire gatekeeping power over a new sensitive category, deciding what spiritual content ships and how it is ranked, without any corresponding governance conversation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the mediator between believer and institution becomes a platform company — raising unresolved questions about who owns and governs the behavioral data generated by intimate practices like prayer tracking, a governance gap the industry has not yet confronted.
The trend: Apps are absorbing the remaining domains of daily life one category at a time — media, calendars, social connection, and now faith — converting every institution into a software competitor.