The best Orthodox Christian apps for iPhone and iPad.
Seven apps worth your Home Screen - what each one is actually for, where each one stops, and the six questions to ask before you install any of them.
The short answer
There is no single best Orthodox app, because the question hides five different ones. For one daily rule in one place, Orthodox Daily Companion. For scripture study, Athon. For matching a particular typicon exactly, OrthoPrax. For the Greek Archdiocese lectionary from the source, Daily Readings. For listening rather than reading, Ancient Faith. Most people end up with two: a calendar and a voice.
A disclosure, before anything else: Orthodox Daily Companion is ours. It is marked throughout, and we have described the other six the way we would describe them to a parishioner who asked - including what each does better than ours.
Last reviewed
№ ii · At a glance
The seven, side by side.
Orthodox Christian apps compared by what each is best for, the platforms it runs on, and who publishes it.
Not ranked. Ordered so the ones that overlap sit next to each other, and every entry says where it stops as well as what it does.
01A daily rule you actually keep
Orthodox Daily Companion Ours
Our own app, and the one we built because nothing else put the whole day in one place: the saint commemorated today, the appointed readings, morning and evening prayer laid out so you can pray them rather than assemble them, and the fasting rule for the date you are standing in.
Free to download, with the daily synaxarion, prayers, and a daily saying included
A Home Screen widget and prayer reminders, so the rule reaches you before you go looking for it
A private journal kept on the device, not on our servers
Both reckonings - every feast marked under Julian and Revised Julian alike
Where it stops. iPhone and iPad only. If you are on Android, use the Lives of the Saints web app in a browser instead.
The most Bible-forward app in the list. Athon builds outward from the Orthodox scriptures rather than from the calendar, so the readings come with study material around them instead of standing alone.
The Orthodox Bible with daily appointed readings
A prayer library with audio, reminders, and a morning and evening rule
More than 900 lives of the saints
Feast and fasting calendars, plus guided Bible studies
Where it stops. The breadth is the point, which also makes it the heaviest app here to learn. If you only want today's saint and today's readings, it is more than you need.
The app to reach for when the calendar question matters to you. OrthoPrax does not pick a tradition on your behalf - it asks which one you keep, and then keeps it.
The calendar follows either the Old (Julian) or the New (Revised Julian) reckoning
Adjustable to the typicons of the Greek, Antiochian, Serbian, Russian, and American churches
The ecclesiastical calendar with the saints' lives attached
More than 3,500 curated icon images, at real resolution
Where it stops. The configurability is front-loaded: you answer questions about your tradition before you get much out of it.
The Archdiocese's own app. If you want the readings exactly as your GOA parish has them, with no third party in between, this is the source rather than a copy of it.
The day's scripture readings as prescribed by the Lectionary of the Greek Orthodox Church
The saints commemorated, and the fasting guidance for the day
Published directly by the Archdiocese
A free Daily Readings Lite edition, if you only need the readings
Where it stops. Deliberately narrow. It gives you the lectionary well and does not try to be a prayer book or a library.
Not a calendar app at all, and it belongs on this list for that reason. Ancient Faith is where the hours you cannot read go - the drive, the dishes, the walk.
Round-the-clock Orthodox internet radio
A deep podcast catalogue - homilies, catechesis, church history, and interviews
Live call-in programmes
Downloadable episodes for offline listening
Where it stops. It will not tell you what today's fast is. Pair it with one of the calendar apps above rather than choosing between them.
These apply to every app on this list, and to the ones that will be written after it.
01
Which calendar does it keep?
This is the first question, not a detail. The Old (Julian) Calendar currently runs thirteen days behind the civil date, so an app on the wrong reckoning will hand you the wrong saint and the wrong fast every single day. Check that it either follows yours or lets you choose.
02
Does it carry the fasting rule, or only the date?
Plenty of apps will tell you it is Wednesday. Fewer will tell you what Wednesday asks of you, and fewer still will distinguish a strict fast from wine and oil allowed. If you are learning the fast, this is the feature that does the teaching.
03
Are the lives written, or are they stubs?
A saint reduced to a name, a date, and a category is a database row. Read one life in the app before you commit to it - you will know within a paragraph whether anyone actually wrote it.
04
Does it work when the signal does not?
The places you most want a prayer book - a hospital corridor, a plane, a monastery guesthouse - are the places with no bars. Ask what the app still does offline.
05
Will it reach you, or must you remember it?
A rule kept twice a week is not a rule. A Home Screen widget or an evening reminder is the difference between an app you installed and an app you use, and it is worth more than any feature list.
06
Who pays for it, and with what?
If an app is free and carries advertising, you are the product being sold in a prayer book. Look for a plain answer: a purchase, a subscription, a parish or ministry behind it, or a publisher who says outright that nothing is tracked and nothing is sold.
One practical note: App Store prices and free tiers change without warning. Everything described here was checked on September 4, 2026; confirm the current terms on the listing before you decide on price alone.
Common questions.
It depends on what you want it to do, which is why this page is a list rather than a winner. For a single daily rule - the saint, the readings, prayer, and the fast in one place - we would point you at Orthodox Daily Companion, though it is ours and you should weigh that. For scripture study, Athon. For matching a particular typicon exactly, OrthoPrax. For the Greek Archdiocese lectionary from the source, the Archdiocese's own Daily Readings. For listening rather than reading, Ancient Faith.
Yes. Orthodox Daily Companion is free to download and includes the daily synaxarion, prayers, and a daily saying, with optional premium features purchased through Apple. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese publishes a free Daily Readings Lite edition. Ancient Faith's radio and podcast library is free to listen to. App Store pricing changes without notice, so check the listing before you decide on that basis.
Most of the calendar apps here mark the fasting periods: Orthodox Daily Companion, Athon, OrthoPrax, Orthodox Calendar, Orthodox Christian Calendar+, and the Archdiocese's Daily Readings all carry fasting guidance for the day. They differ in how much they explain - whether you are told simply that it is a fast day, or told what degree of fast it is and why.
It varies, and it matters more than any other setting. OrthoPrax lets you choose the reckoning and the tradition. Orthodox Daily Companion marks every feast under both. Jurisdictional apps such as the Greek Archdiocese's Daily Readings follow their own church's practice. Confirm this first: on the wrong reckoning, every day is thirteen days wrong.
Look for one that explains rather than assumes. The apps that only list - a date, a name, a reading reference - presume you already know the shape of the day. The ones worth a catechumen's time give the readings context, write the saints' lives as stories, and say what the fast actually asks. Orthodox Daily Companion and Athon are both written that way; Ancient Faith's catechetical podcasts are a good companion to either.
Athon, Ancient Faith, and the Archdiocese's Daily Readings publish Android editions. Orthodox Daily Companion is iPhone and iPad only, but the separate Lives of the Saints web app runs in any modern browser on any device, and our free Saint of the Day extension puts a saint on every new tab in Chrome and Edge.
Free to download, from the family that has printed the Lives of the Saints calendar since 1995. If one of the other six suits you better, install that one instead - we would rather you kept the rule than kept our app.