Miguel Castellanos
All work

A family of mobile apps

2012 – today Creator, designer and developer Independent

In 2012 I built a hymnal for Android in my spare time: the lyrics, the music to sing along to, and no need for a connection inside a church. People kept installing it and asking for more. Fourteen years later it is a family of apps in Spanish, English and Portuguese, on Android and iOS, with hundreds of thousands of installs.

The icons of the seven apps in the family

What I built

Everything from product design to publishing: the apps and the library they share, the server and its API, the web and desktop versions, and the support that keeps them working for the people who use them.

The hymnal

Three hymnals in one app: 613 hymns in Spanish, 695 in English and 610 in Portuguese, each with its recording. The words light up in time with the music, hymns play one after another in the background, and they can be found by number, title, words or topic, kept in lists, shown as sheet music, or projected in church from a tablet or a computer.

The devotionals

A daily reading for six audiences, from adults to children, in three languages. Each reading has its audio or can be read aloud by the phone, can be highlighted and shared, and the yearly books download for reading without a connection. A full-screen view shows the day’s verse over a photograph.

The other apps

Built on the same shared library, on Android and iOS.

  • Choruses

    410 short songs with sung recordings and word-by-word karaoke.

    A chorus lit up over a photograph

  • Children’s hymnal

    150 children’s hymns with sung recordings and karaoke.

    A children’s hymn lit up over a photograph

  • The 1962 hymnal

    The previous edition, 527 hymns, with slides for projection.

    A hymn as a projection slide

  • Beliefs

    The church’s fundamental beliefs to read and search, with games to learn them.

    Learning games: questions, memory and matching

  • Reading plan

    A year-long daily plan with four tracks of reading and reminders.

    The plan’s progress for each track

How they started

2013

The first version: lyrics verse by verse over photographs, to sing along or to project.

2021

Recordings in the background and karaoke in time with the music. By then four apps shared about 90% of their code through a library I extracted from the first one; today it runs ten.

Platforms

Android, iOS, web, Mac and Windows

Built with

Java, Kotlin, Swift, PHP, TypeScript, C# and .NET, Firebase