Oratide is a bell, not a feed. It keeps the hours you set, shows you what the Church keeps today, and gets out of the way. This page answers the questions people ask most. Where the app cannot do something, it says so here in the same size type as everything else.
Everything below describes the app as it is in this version. If something on this page and something on your screen disagree, the screen is right and we would like to hear about it.
Oratide has three tabs: Today, The Rule, and Intentions. Settings is behind the sliders icon at the top right of each of those three screens.
Today shows the day in the Church's year — the feast or the weekday, its rank, its colour, and the season — and the next hour that is due. Below that are your hours for the day, the Rosary's mysteries for the day, and the feasts coming up. All of it is computed on your device from your Rule and the calendar. Nothing is fetched.
The Rule is your rule of life: a handful of named time blocks, each with a time, the days it belongs to, a bell, and an ordered list of what is prayed in it. A fresh install comes with five:
| Block | Time | Days | Bell |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lauds | 6:30 am | Weekdays | Single bell |
| The Rosary | 8:00 am | Saturday and Sunday | Single bell |
| The Angelus | Noon | Every day | Angelus peal |
| Vespers | 6:00 pm | Every day | Single bell |
| Compline | 9:30 pm | Every day | Hand bell |
The weekend is deliberately unlike the week. Lauds is a weekday hour; Saturday and Sunday begin with the Rosary instead. Every one of these is a starting point. Change any of it.
When a block's time comes, a card appears at the bottom of whatever screen you are on. It names the hour and the time and offers three things: Pray now, In 15 minutes, and Skip today. It is not a modal — the screen behind it keeps working, and ignoring it is a complete and legitimate response.
Pray now opens the whole block, in order, on a screen with nothing else on it. A prayer that has a Latin original can show it under the English (the controls sheet on the prayer screen, "Show the Latin"). The controls also set the pace, the length of the silence between prayers, and a sleep timer. When the block ends there is no chime and no celebration — one soft vibration if your device has one and you have left that switched on, and the screen says "Finished at" the time. That is all.
In 15 minutes puts the bell back by a quarter of an hour. You can do it more than once. The card never shows a count.
Skip today makes the bell go away until tomorrow. The skip is remembered only until the day turns, changes no number, and no screen in the app mentions it afterwards.
A bell stays "due" for thirty minutes after its time. If you open Oratide within that half hour, the card is waiting. After that it is gone — a bell four hours old would be an accusation, and the app does not make those.
Open The Rule and tap a block to edit it. Each block has four parts:
What a bell is, in this version, said plainly. The bell is struck by the app itself — synthesised from a bell's own partials, not played from a recording — so nothing is downloaded to ring it. When a block comes due while Oratide is open, the card described above appears, the block's chosen bell sounds once, and there is one soft vibration where the phone has one. If the sound is held until you touch the screen, the card says so. In the block editor, "Hear" beside each bell strikes it before you choose.
An item in the queue is either the same prayer every time, or a cycle that changes by itself: the Rosary's mysteries change with the day of the week, Compline changes with the day, and the Psalter goes through in order, one psalm further each time the block is prayed. The block never changes; what the slot resolves to does.
Add a time block makes a new hour. A block can be duplicated (a copy is how most people build a weekday/weekend pair) and deleted. If you delete one of the five that ship with the app, a "Put back" button appears on the Rule screen until you use it. If you delete all of them, the Rule offers "Start with these five blocks" or "Build my own, one block at a time".
The bells are also reachable from Settings → Bells → The next ringing of each, where each block has a switch and a sentence saying exactly when it will next ring. You can silence a block there without touching your Rule.
Every block belongs to a set of days, and it rings on those days and no others. Under "The days it belongs to" there are three one-tap patterns — Every day, Weekdays, Weekends — and seven toggles, Sunday first, for anything else.
Underneath, one sentence says what will actually happen next and which days stay silent. Set a block to weekdays on a Friday evening and it reads "Rings on Monday at 6:30 AM. Not tomorrow, which is Saturday. Weekdays. Silent on Saturday and Sunday." That sentence is the point of the feature: you can read that the rule is working without waiting to find out.
A block with no days chosen is a real state. The editor says so and the block never rings until you choose at least one.
The Rule screen has a week strip along the top. Tap a day to see which blocks belong to it and which are silent that day. Absence is shown, not hidden.
This is the question every prayer app gets and the one most of them answer badly, so here is the whole of it.
Oratide on Google Play is an Android app, and in this release a bell reaches you in one place only: inside the app, while it is open.
Inside the app — always. While Oratide is open, the bell comes on time: the card, the block's bell (if it has one) struck once by the app, and one soft vibration where the phone has one. If the sound is held until you touch the screen, the card says so. The schedule is worked out on your phone from your Rule and the clock, sixty days ahead, with no server involved and nothing to fetch. Airplane mode changes none of it. The app checks the clock at least every fifteen minutes and again the moment you come back to it, so a bell that came due while your phone was locked is waiting when you pick it up again — as long as that was within the thirty-minute window above.
As a notification — not in this release. This release contains no notification plugin, and the Android web view that draws the app has no web notifications, so nothing is posted to your notification shade. On the Bells screen (Settings → Bells → The next ringing of each), under "Where the bell can reach you", the switch "Show bells as notifications" cannot be turned on and reads "This browser has no notifications at all."
With Oratide closed — not in this release. When Oratide is closed, no bell rings. Open it within thirty minutes of a bell's time and the card is waiting.
Some lines in the app were written for a web browser and still say "this browser" or "a limit of the web". In the Play app, read them as "this version of the app".
Settings → Bells → Reminder health (also reachable from the Bells screen) checks every part of this on the phone you are holding, right now. It does not fetch anything.
If bells have been due for three days and none reached you, Reminder Health says so on its own — in words about the delivery path, never about you.
Oratide is a Catholic app in the Roman rite. The one thing it cannot guess is which form of the Roman calendar you follow, because that changes which feast is kept on which day. It asks once, on first run, and the answer lives in Settings → The calendar. Changing it never touches anything you have written. The app takes no position on either.
Both calendars are computed on your device, for any date, with no network. The Settings screen shows today's celebration under whichever you have chosen so you can check the change took.
What the 1962 calendar does not yet carry, said plainly. It has the whole temporal cycle and the first-, second- and third-class feasts of the universal calendar. It does not carry the proper calendars of nations, dioceses or religious orders, the full third-class sanctoral of the Martyrology, or the rules for concurring Offices at Vespers. Where a day has no entry it returns the ferial office, which is what the Missal itself prescribes. We would rather list this than round it up.
If you find a wrong feast on either calendar, tell us the date and the calendar you had set. One wrong day in Holy Week matters more to us than most bugs.
All of this is in Settings, under "The look" and "The size of the prayer". Everything takes effect the moment you touch it.
Theme. Three choices: Follow the system, Parchment (ink on parchment, the daytime look), and Ember (warm ink on black). The accent colour is never a choice — it is the liturgical colour of the day, so the app turns violet in Advent and Lent, green in Ordinary Time, gold on feasts, red for martyrs and Pentecost, and rose on Gaudete and Laetare.
Compline, or night mode. The night office is prayed in the dark, so Oratide has a third palette for it: true black, warm-shifted ink, and no white surface anywhere. Three settings:
Prayer text size. Five sizes, from Smallest to Largest, with a specimen of the Douay–Rheims under them so you can see the size before you choose it. Only the prayer body scales; navigation stays where your thumb learned it. This sits on top of your device's own text-size setting: if you have made text larger for everything, this makes the prayer larger again, and at the largest of both nothing in the app clips or moves out of reach. The size control is part of the Free Core Covenant and can never be sold.
There is nothing to cancel. Oratide 1.0 is free. Buying it is not open in this version — the build on Google Play has no store billing in it and cannot charge you — so there is no subscription, no renewal, no trial and no charge to stop. A cancel button would be a control for something that cannot happen, so there is not one anywhere in the app.
Restore purchases is on Settings → Your purchase → Charges and refunds, and on the offer screen. In this version nothing can have been bought, so it finds nothing to restore and says so: everything free is already here.
In this version there is nothing to refund. Oratide 1.0 is free and cannot take a payment, so no charge exists for a refund to undo. Settings → Your purchase → Charges and refunds is in the app, and in this version it has no charges on it.
When Oratide is sold through Google Play, the charge will be taken by Google Play and a refund issued by Google Play, back to the payment method that was charged; the app has no way to issue one itself. If a request falls outside the store's own window, write to us — a person will still read it.
What it will cost. The app's offer screen names the price it will have: $9.99, once — no yearly plan, no monthly plan, no trial and no second charge. In this version that screen cannot take the money: before anything happens it says "Purchases are not open yet, so nothing here can be charged."
What the money will be for. Two things, and the app is careful to say which of them exists:
It never pays for the texts, the bells, the calendar, or anything else on the Covenant, because those cannot be sold.
What was withdrawn, and is not coming back. Before 9 September 2026 Oratide was planned as a subscription at $39.99 a year, promising four other things: recorded human readings, sung settings, offline audio, and household sharing. Three of them needed people Oratide does not have and will not have — a narrator, a schola, a studio — and the fourth needed an account and a server, which Oratide refuses to have. They were deleted on 9 September 2026 rather than deferred, and the planned price became $9.99 once at the same time. Nobody was ever charged for any of them. The Covenant screen's own change log records the withdrawal inside the app, where it cannot be quietly reverted.
Nothing is sold while you are praying. From the moment a prayer begins until two minutes after it ends, the app is unable to show anything commercial — not a banner, not a rating prompt, not the support row in Settings. That is enforced in the code, and a test fails the build if it is broken. Nothing commercial appears when the app opens, ever. Once, after you have completed prayers on three different days, a single full-screen invitation may appear, with "Continue free" in ordinary type; dismiss it and it does not come back on its own.
Intentions is the third tab: the names you carry. Tap Name someone to add a name, an optional note, and the day of the week you carry it on, or every day. When a prayer is answered, give thanks for it; it moves to With thanks and stays there, with the date, for as long as you like.
Free, you carry seven names at a time — one for each day of the week. Giving thanks for one makes room for another. The limit is on how many you carry today, never on how many you may ever name, and no name is ever taken away.
Export. Reading, editing, giving thanks and exporting are never gated, in any tier, whether or not you have ever paid. Under "Yours to keep" on the Intentions screen:
Files are named oratide-intentions-YYYY-MM-DD.txt or .json. The file does not repeat the privacy promise inside itself; the Intentions screen says it once, at its foot. If your browser or device will not save a file, the preview shows the whole document in a box you can select and copy, so the promise holds even when the download does not.
The same two exports are in Settings, under "The names you carry".
Export everything. Also in Settings, under "This device": Export everything writes your Rule, your intentions, your record and every setting to one file, oratide-everything-YYYY-MM-DD.json. Restore from a file merges a file you exported before; what is on the device now is backed up first, and nothing is overwritten that the file does not name. Erase everything on this device does what it says, after one confirmation, and keeps one copy of what was erased in the app's own storage, in case that was a mistake, until the next import, erase or data migration replaces it. There is no copy anywhere else, because nothing was ever sent to one.
Settings → What we promise → The Free Core Covenant. It is a numbered list of everything that can never move behind a price, versioned and dated, with a change log. Version 1.0 was first published on 24 August 2026; the current version is 1.2, published on 9 September 2026, and no item has ever been removed — v1.1 (4 September 2026) added, to two of them, the sentence that they have not been built yet, and v1.2 recorded the withdrawal of four paid promises and that the price stopped recurring, touching nothing on this list. The ten items:
This is not a policy. The function in the code that decides whether anything is locked reads this list first and returns "not locked" before it looks at what you have paid. The Covenant screen runs that check live every time you open it and prints the state it is running under. The change log is append-only, and the paid tier may only ever add to this list. Anything ever shipped free stays free, including for people who install Oratide tomorrow.
Two honest notes. Items 5 and 8 name things that are not in this version, and the Covenant screen says so beside each. There is no widget, watch or CarPlay in Oratide. No person has recorded anything, and the app marks the transcripts as not made yet; since the 9 September 2026 decision that Oratide will never have a narrator, no such recording is planned. The Covenant says those things can never be sold. It does not say they exist. When they do, they arrive free.
Oratide prints public-domain text only. Every prayer names, on the page, the edition it comes from, its year and its translator, and Settings → What we promise → Sources gathers all of it into a catalogue you can search by prayer, by edition, by translator or by year. There is no modern licensed translation anywhere in the app.
The editions in use:
The Way of the Cross of St Alphonsus Liguori (Benziger, 1887) is registered and cleared, but the Stations are not in this version. Sources lists it "On the shelf" rather than hiding the empty shelf.
What has been checked, and how. The corpus was first set from renderings we did not trust, so we checked it:
What has not been done, and the app says so. A person has not yet sat down with a printed copy of any of these editions and collated the words against it. The Sources screen marks every edition Collated, Checked mechanically or Not yet collated, explains what each means, and will name the printing checked when one is. Even the Douay–Rheims entry says plainly that its check was against a digital transcription, not a physical printing, and that a transcription error would be inherited. Several editions — the Raccolta and the Bute Breviary among them — are additionally marked Printing to confirm, because the specific printing or scan we work from has its own provenance still to be confirmed by a person. The "What is still open" section at the bottom of Sources is generated from the register itself, so it shrinks as the work is done and cannot go stale.
What Oratide does not print. Much of the English a Catholic hears every week is under licence: the New American Bible readings, the current English Liturgy of the Hours and the Grail psalms printed with it, the 2011 Missal texts, and most contemporary English Bibles. They are not ours to reprint, so Oratide prints the older editions, names them on every prayer, and stops there. A test reads the shipped build and fails it if a line of that material has found its way in. If you were expecting the wording you hear at Mass, this is why it is different, and we would rather you knew before installing than after.
Recordings. One recording ships in this version, and it is a computer voice, badged as one wherever it plays: it reads the reflections Oratide wrote for the Examen, and not one line the Church wrote. Every other prayer is read on the screen. No person has recorded anything, and since the 9 September 2026 decision that Oratide will never have a narrator, none is planned. The code holds any recording to these rules: a computer voice is badged on the track and is refused for scripture and liturgy; a recording by a person cannot be published without a time-synced transcript; every recording is bound to the same edition printed beside it; and only our own recordings are published.
There is no account, and nothing asks who you are. Your Rule, your intentions, your record and your settings are written to your device's own storage and read back from it. Oratide never uploads them. If you have switched on Android's own backup to your Google account, Android may include them in that backup; the privacy policy says more. There is no analytics of any kind — no events, no crash reporter, no session recording — and no advertisement, nor any slot one could be put into. The app makes no network request when it opens; once installed, it runs with the network off.
The About screen (Settings → What we promise → About Oratide) lists the libraries inside the web app — there are two, and both only draw the screen — and a test fails the build if that list and the web app's real one disagree. The Google Play version also carries the Capacitor shell that holds the web app, and this build installs no Capacitor plugin.
The record. Off unless you turn it on (Settings → The record → Keep a record). When on, it is a calendar of days prayed, a count for this month, and a lifetime total. There is no streak, no consecutive-day counter — not even a hidden one — and no number in the app can go down. A day you did not pray is simply a day. Rest days are part of the picture, not a gap in it.
Oratide is an independent project. It is not an official publication of any diocese, religious order, publisher, or the Holy See, and it carries no imprimatur. It is not spiritual direction and does not stand in for your parish. It is a clock with the right texts in it.
We do not use your attention for anything but the bells you set. There is a second class of notification — occasional messages from Oratide, off by default and capped at one a week, with the cap shown in the app — and there will never be a third.
Getting help. Write to: support@chibuapps.com
A person reads every message. If you write about a charge or a refund, a person answers it. We have not yet published a response-time promise; when we do, it will be here and in the app, not in a policy document.
Replies to store reviews will be signed with a name.