The Lantern Bible · the app
The whole Bible, on every device you own —
and it never once goes online.
The same text and the same typography as the Lantern Bible ePub and PDF editions, built into a reading and study app for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and ChromeOS. Footnotes, search, the topical index, your own highlights and notes. It is free on every platform, it has no account and no subscription, and it makes no network request at all — not one, not ever.
Three commitments, in the order they matter
The text is sacred. Every word the app displays is exactly the word the source carries. That is not one requirement among many — it is the constraint the rest of the design serves, and it outranks performance, convenience and schedule. The ePub and PDF editions already hold that line: 31,086 verses diffed against the official Berean Standard Bible text before a release is allowed out, with zero mismatches. The app inherits the same discipline and extends it to the places a reading application can corrupt text that a publishing pipeline cannot — rendering, search, copying and failure. The shipped text is hashed, and the app checks that hash the first time it opens the file. If it does not match, the app says so plainly rather than showing you the text.
The typography is inherited, not re-invented. Poetry set at two levels with the hanging indent, antiphonal refrains that get no extra air, declarative superscriptions, section headings, the measured column width — all of it comes across from the editions rather than being guessed at again on a screen. Charis SIL, the face of the PDF editions, is bundled with the app exactly as SIL distributes it. Where the app departs from the printed page, it departs on purpose and the reason is written down.
It does not talk to anyone. There is no account, no server of ours, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporter, no advertising, and not even an update checker. The whole Bible — text, footnotes and the topical index — ships inside the app, so it works on first launch with the radio off and keeps working on a mountain, on a plane, or ten years from now when a website has gone dark.
Everything you need to read and to study
This is the shipping scope, not a wish list. What is planned but not built is named further down, and named as such.
Two ways to read
- Study is the Standard edition — spaced paragraphs, cross-references, footnote markers
- Read is the Reader’s Edition — book-set paragraphs, no apparatus, a 73-character measure
- Focus hides the app bar and status strip on top of either
- The app never gets stuck in Focus — it is not remembered between launches
One continuous text
- The whole canon in one flow — Genesis 50 runs into Exodus 1, as the print edition has it
- Books open; chapters flow
- Your place is anchored to a verse, so it survives a change of type size, column width or screen
- Real headings and real paragraphs, so a screen reader reads it properly
Footnotes without leaving the verse
- A footnote opens over the page and closes again — you never lose the line you were on
- A popover with a mouse, a bottom sheet on a touchscreen
- Cross-references show the passage itself, read-only
- Going there is a second, deliberate tap — never an accident
One search box
- Type
jn 3:16,ps 23,1co13orgen 1:1-5and go straight there - Type
joand it offers John, Joel, Jonah, Job and Joshua rather than guessing - References, books, topics, verses and your own notes — one box, results in that order
- Exact words and phrases, with no stemming to widen your query behind your back
- Results in canonical order, with counts per book, so you can see the shape of an answer
The topical index
- All 46,592 topics, browsable, set in the printed index’s own layout
- Cross-linked both ways — topic to verse, and verse to the topics that cite it
- Built from 140,571 verse links, every one of which is checked before release
- Every verse beside a topic is drawn live from the text, never from a stored preview that could go stale
Highlights and notes
- Highlight a verse or a range; write a note against it
- Tap a verse to select it whole — no fighting with text selection handles
- The verse sheet is one place for everything about a verse: highlight, note, footnotes, cross-references, topics, copy with the reference
- When the underlying text is revised, a highlight re-anchors by the words it quoted — or is flagged for you. It is never silently moved onto different words
Sync without an account
- Point the app at a folder on a cloud drive you already use — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, a synced network folder
- Each device writes only its own file, so there is nothing to collide and no “conflicted copy”
- Merged in any order, on any device, the result is the same
- Entirely optional. Skip it and nothing leaves the machine
Your notes are yours
- Export every highlight and note to a plain, readable file, whenever you like
- Import it back, on this device or another
- With no account and no service behind it, export is the thing that makes years of notes survive a lost laptop — so it ships in version one, not later
- Read the privacy policy
Checked, not just converted
The same four numbers the ePub and PDF editions publish, carried through to the screen — plus a fifth that only an app can claim.
The text is built from the same verified artifacts as the editions, and the build refuses to publish if a single verse differs. The finished file is hashed, and that hash is compiled into the app itself — so the first time the app opens the text, it confirms that what shipped is what was checked. Nothing rewrites, normalizes or “fixes” a verse between the file and your screen, and a test proves it by comparing what the screen actually renders against what the file actually holds, character for character.
That last number is the one worth dwelling on. The app makes no network request of any kind. Not for the text, not for a font, not for an update check, not for a crash report. There is nothing to switch off, because there is nothing there.
Every device you own
Linux is out now, as a direct download. Mac, Windows and the iPhone and iPad app are close to a first release; Android and ChromeOS follow. Nothing still to come carries a date — when a listing goes live, so does its button on this page.
Why hand a free app to the stores at all? Three reasons. Signing. A store build is signed and checked before it reaches you, so your device can prove the app came from us and arrived unaltered — which matters more, not less, for something you will trust with Scripture. Finding it. The store on your device is where people already look, and installing from it is one tap instead of a download, a security warning and a drag.
And above all, updates. The app makes no network request of any kind — which means it has no update checker and no way to tell you a newer version exists. The store is what closes that gap: it keeps the app current without the app ever having to reach out on its own. Distributing it ourselves would mean either breaking the no-network promise or leaving you on an old build forever, and we are not willing to do either.
Linux is the exception, because there is no one store every distribution shares. There it is a .deb or .rpm downloaded straight from us and installed by your package manager — which is how Linux software is normally delivered. Install it with apt or dnf rather than dpkg -i or rpm -i, and the package will pull in what the app needs. These packages are not signed, so your package manager may say the origin cannot be verified; each file’s SHA-256 is published on the release page if you would like to check what you downloaded. Linux is also the one platform where updates are on you: check back here for a newer package, because the app itself will never tell you one exists.
It is free everywhere, and free means free: no price, no trial, no in-app purchase, no “pro” tier, no donation prompt inside the app. Where a store will not permit a price of zero, we will not be there — the same rule the ePub and PDF editions already follow.
The whole text travels inside the app, which makes the download larger than you might expect for a Bible: the Linux packages are about 29 MB. That is the price of never needing a connection, and we think it is a bargain. Read the privacy policy →
Designed for, not promised
These are not on a roadmap with dates on it. They are features the version-one design deliberately left room for, so that adding them later is an addition rather than a rebuild. That is all the commitment we are making today.
Reading plans need a table and no new concepts. Ink notes have had a place kept for them in the note record since the first line of the design, and will be drawn in the notes margin rather than over the text — which is exactly what the annotation-margin PDFs already do on paper. None of it changes the reading surface, which is the whole point of arranging it this way.
The first build has landed
Linux is out today, free and complete. Mac, Windows and the iPhone and iPad app are near a first release; Android and ChromeOS follow. We are still not naming a date for those, because a date we miss helps nobody — but it is no longer far off. In the meantime the same text is already yours, in three ePub and ten PDF editions, complete and free.
The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com and the Berean Bible Translation Committee, who dedicated it to the public domain in April 2023. The typography, formatting and navigation apparatus prepared for the Lantern Bible editions are dedicated under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication; that dedication grants no rights in the names “The Lantern Bible” or “Lacy Digital Labs”. The book outlines and the topical index are reproduced from reference works published by Bible Hub and used by permission; they are not covered by that dedication. Charis SIL is used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and is bundled unmodified. The application itself is proprietary software of Lacy Digital Labs, LLC, published as a ministry and not sold. Apple, iPhone, iPad and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc.; Google, Android, Google Play and ChromeOS are trademarks of Google LLC; Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Lacy Digital Labs, LLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.