Oratide
The Catholic hours, kept on your phone.
Oratide is a Catholic app of the hours. It shows what the Church keeps today, rings a bell at the hours you set while it is open, and opens straight into the prayers — from named public-domain editions.
A bell, not a feed.
Free. No subscription, no account, no ads.The Free Core Covenant below is the part that cannot change.
Quiet, and we mean it
Each line here is a fact about the code, not a policy that could be quietly changed.
- No account. Nothing asks who you are: no sign-up, no email address, no name, no age, and no question about your religion.
- No server. There is no backend, so the app has no address to send anything to.
- Oratide sends nothing off your phone. Your hours, the names you carry and the record of days are written to the app’s own storage on the device, and the app sends them nowhere. Android’s own backup, if you have switched it on, may include them in your Google account.
- Offline is not a degraded mode. Airplane mode is a supported way to use Oratide; the calendar, the texts and the bells all work with the network off.
- No streak. There is no consecutive-day counter anywhere in Oratide. The record is off until you turn it on, and nothing in it can go down.
- No advertisements, no analytics, no crash reporter, and no third-party code that reports on you. There is no slot in the interface an advertisement could be put into.
- Nothing asks you for money while you are praying, or in the two minutes after. That is a rule the code enforces, not a promise about our manners.
The ten that can never be put behind a price
The Free Core Covenant is in the app, version 1.2, published 9 September 2026, with a change log. It is a numbered list of everything that can never move behind a paywall:
- Every prayer text, all of it
- Every bell, and as many as you want
- The whole liturgical calendar
- All of it with the network off
- Every transcript, the day there is one
- Every accessibility feature, permanently
- Seven saved intentions
- Widgets, CarPlay and the watch, the day they exist
- Your own words, exportable in one tap
- The last day of every sequence
The paid tier may only ever add to that list. Anything ever shipped free stays free, including for people who install Oratide tomorrow. The list is not a policy: the function that decides whether anything is locked reads it first and answers "not locked" before it looks at what anyone has paid.
Two of the ten name things that are not in this version — the transcripts and the widgets — and their own words say so. The Covenant promises only that they can never be sold. It does not say they exist.
What it looks like
