WORDsearch Bible

This app was refreshed with a lot of improvements, however it still falls short of some others out there. It hasn't been updated in a while. Lifeway should really invest more in it to get and keep it up to speed. For example the transitions between chapters is annoying at best, night time reading mode is all but useless when reading the words of Christ, and the library is limited (or too confusing for me to find more). That said, the split screen is great and the pop up windows are the best I've seen. Wordsearch desktop is my sermon prep software of choice, so I have faith that with just a little work this app could be leading the pack!

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The Good: You can access some (not all) of your library. You can read the books fine. Navigation works for most (not all) of your books. You can download books and avoid or minimize using your mobile internet access for that. The bad: Crashes. Buggy. Title searches are exact match only. Text searches only search the content you downloaded. Text searches are any verse with any of the words you typed that it can search for. You cannot search for “and”, “or”, or “not” and several other small words. If you search for “love joy” you get all the references to anything that contains love and joy, so if you only wanted to see items that contained both love and joy, you have to go through all the results to find them yourself. On my device there are only about 70,000 results for that search! The following return the same results: “love joy”, “love and joy”, “love not joy”, etc. (proving that it ignores words like “and”, “not”, etc.). So to summarize - if you want to read your library on the go, the app will probably work for that for most of your books. But if you want to do too much more than that, use your PC or maybe another mobile app that lets you do real searches and facilitates in-depth study on the go.

For a long time, study of scripture and books by authors writing about biblical aspects was purely a "dead tree" format for me. I tried digital study when it first began to become a reality, but it frustrated me more than helped. I am extremely happy to say that with WORDsearch I am finding a new groove in my bible study and love how I can acquire new writings for additional study. Using WORDsearch has also completely changed HOW I do my studies! Rather than being so focused on reading passages and then going back for cross references and related studies, I find it much easier to simply click on the areas I wish to dive into and get the info I'm looking for in real time. Seeing the original Hebrew text and the definitions in Strongs for example as I read each passage has totally changed how deep I study and how much I learn. I still have a lot to learn about the software but I'm thrilled with it so far. My only advice is that if you are doing a lot of study, you may want a second monitor. My 17" laptop is great, but once I have more than 4 windows open, it becomes harder to manage. And that's my 2 cents (or shekels as we'd say in the Old Testament).

I have used the LifeWay apps for teaching and study. All of them have the same flaw. If you highlight a section, you can’t add a note to that section unless you delete the highlight. You can write the note first, then highlight, or you can add the note nearby. It would be nice to have the option to do both at the same time. Additionally, the scroll/page turn navigation needs to be something that can be set for one or the other. It is really annoying to be scrolling through a chapter and suddenly have everything jump around on me because I accidentally touched the screen. I then waste half a minute trying to find my place again.

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I tried to like this app but it is not as nice as the desktop app. With the iPad version, they should be able to make it closer to the desktop app, especially when you look at the computational power of the iPad Pro For those needing parallel Bibles, this one limits you to 2 because it can only split the screen once. At least you can search a book or your whole library which is good and it does detect when you don't have wifi so that it'll only search your downloaded content. I was trying this app on a 12.9" iPad Pro but I think I need to get the Microsoft Surface tablet and use the full version of the Wordsearch Bible application instead of the iOS app.