Everything we've been asked.

No. That's the point. The Pillar shows you the original word, how it's pronounced, what range of meaning it carries and everywhere else it's used — in English. Eighty-nine of the most important words have a written study you can read in two minutes.

King James, New King James, NASB (2020), Christian Standard Bible, New Living Translation, The Message, American Standard, the Berean Standard Bible, the World English Bible, Young's Literal, Darby, the Douay-Rheims, the Bible in Basic English and the 1599 Geneva Bible. Below English, three Spanish Bibles — Reina-Valera 1909, Palabra de Dios para Ti and the Nueva Biblia Viva — an Arabic Bible, and the Greek and Hebrew. None of them need any setup from you.

The King James text is built into the app, along with Strong's, the lexicons, the five dictionaries, the topical index and the maps — none of those need a connection. Chapters you read are kept automatically, and whole translations can be downloaded where their license allows. Commentaries are fetched a chapter at a time. The New King James, NASB, Christian Standard Bible, New Living Translation and The Message are never stored offline, as their licenses don't permit it.

Yes — one purchase covers iPhone and iPad. Handwriting and the journal are iPad-only, because they need an Apple Pencil. Everything else is the same on both.

Yes, on Android phones and tablets running Android 8 or later, from Google Play. The translations, the word study, commentaries, dictionaries, maps, sermon notes with recording, reading plans and search are all there. Handwriting and the journal are not, because they need an Apple Pencil. Notes don't sync between Android and an iPhone or iPad, and a subscription bought from one store doesn't unlock the app from the other — see the questions on sync and subscriptions below.

Free to read: every public-domain translation (the King James, the Berean Standard Bible, the World English Bible, the ASV and more, plus three Spanish Bibles, Arabic and the Greek and Hebrew texts), with notes, highlights, tags, reading plans, streaks, the daily verse, the audio Bible, maps, share cards and basic sermon notes. A free reader can also open three verses a day in the study drawer, and the chapter of the day is fully open to everyone.

Premium is the study apparatus: the Greek and Hebrew on every verse, the commentaries, dictionaries and topical index, the study drawer without limit, the five licensed translations (NKJV, NASB, NLT, The Message and the CSB), sermon recording and camera scan, and Apple Pencil handwriting on iPad. That content costs money to license and keep accurate, and the alternative is selling your attention or your data. Every new install gets the first week of Premium free, with nothing to sign up for; Premium itself starts with a 7-day trial you can cancel in two taps.

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Tap the translation name in the reader's header to open the picker. The licensed translations are shown live — nothing to set up. Commentary, cross-references, topics, places and the original-language words work in any of them, Spanish included; the word tap and the dictionaries need the English text.

Press and hold a word to see the original Greek or Hebrew behind it, with its Strong's definition and every other verse it appears in. It works in the Berean Standard Bible, the King James, the World English Bible and the American Standard Version, which carry word-level tagging, and in the NKJV, NASB and CSB, where each verse is matched against those as you read. A word that isn't tagged simply won't respond, and those three have a few more of those.

The scholarship is other people's; the reflections are ours. Strong's numbers, the lemma and parsing, and the fuller Abbott-Smith (Greek) and Brown-Driver-Briggs (Hebrew) lexicon entries come from the sources credited under Settings → About, and a word study shows you those entries directly. The shorter pieces written around them — "Biblical Meaning", "Apply It" and the rest — are The Pillar's own summaries, grounded in those same entries rather than quoting any one commentator. The commentaries in the verse drawer are always named, so you can see whose voice you are reading.

Yes. Alongside the usual word matches, Search lists verses that are close in meaning under "Related in meaning" — so "anxiety" finds Philippians 4:6 even though the King James puts it as "Be careful for nothing." This runs entirely on your device, works offline, and works the same in every translation.

Swipe left in the reading pane for the next chapter and right for the previous one, like turning a page. You can also use Previous/Next Chapter in the reader's ••• menu, tap the chapter name in the header to jump anywhere, or press ⌘← / ⌘→ on a hardware keyboard.

Turn on the Daily Verse notification under Settings → Notifications and choose a time. The Pillar schedules it locally on your device — nothing is sent to a server.

Open the plan and tap Leave plan, or press and hold the plan's card on the Today tab and choose Leave plan. It stops appearing on Today and turns off its daily reminder. The plan stays in the library, and reading any day starts it again.

Tap a verse to select it, then use the action bar to highlight it in a color, copy it, or attach a note. Your highlights, notes and bookmarks are private to you — stored on your device and, on iPhone and iPad when you're signed in to iCloud, in your own iCloud account so your other devices see them too.

Yes, through iCloud, automatically. Notes, highlights, bookmarks, tags, handwriting, journal pages, sermon notes and reading progress all travel between devices signed in to the same Apple Account. They live in your private iCloud database, which we can't read. Settings → Sync shows whether it's on; if it says "Sign in to iCloud", sign in under Settings → Apple Account on the device and it starts on its own. The first sync after signing in can take a minute.

Not between Android and an iPhone or iPad. On Android, notes, highlights, bookmarks and reading progress stay on the device, and Android's own backup keeps them with the rest of your app data, so they come back when you set up a new Android phone from that backup. Sermon recordings are too large for that backup; they move to a new phone when you transfer directly from the old one. To take your notes from one platform to the other, export them as Markdown.

A note icon before the number means you've saved a note on that verse — tap it to open the note. It appears in every translation, and on every device you sync. A small clay pencil on the corner of a verse number marks handwriting that can't be shown where you are — ink from your iPad when you're on the iPhone, or ink written over the words in another translation or the other orientation. Tap it to see the handwriting.

Yes. The Library's search box matches your notes' text, their tags, and the verse they're attached to — so searching "family" finds every note wearing that tag, whether or not the word appears in the note itself.

They're stored on your device. On iPhone and iPad, if you have iCloud enabled, they sync privately through your own iCloud account; on Android, Android's backup keeps them with your other app data. On either, you can export all of your notes as Markdown at any time from Settings → Notes → Export Notes as Markdown.

They stay on your device, and in your iCloud account or Android backup. Nothing is deleted.

On iPad, yes — in any translation. The blank strips beside the text take Pencil ink; a finger still scrolls. Your handwriting is anchored to the verse it sits beside, so it stays with that verse when the text reflows or the iPad rotates. The Pencil palette — tips, colors, eraser, lasso — appears with your first stroke. If you close it, choose Drawing Tools from the reader's ••• menu to bring it back.

Yes, with Write in the Text in the reader's ••• menu. Writing over the words needs a fixed copy of the text to sit on, so The Pillar asks you once to choose a study copy — one public-domain translation your handwriting lives in. Other translations show a marker where your writing is, and one tap takes you back to it. Writing over the words is also tied to the way you were holding the iPad; turn it the other way and the marker stands in. The licensed translations can't be written in — their licenses don't allow their text to be altered or stored — but margin writing works in all of them.

With Write in the Text off, sweep the Pencil across the words. Sweep across words that are already highlighted to remove the highlight — the preview turns gray to show that's what will happen. Highlighting by finger from the action bar works the same in every mode.

Both. Choose the lasso in the palette, circle some ink with the Pencil, and drag it — it re-anchors to the verse you drop it beside. For shapes, draw a line, arrow, rectangle or circle freehand and hold the Pencil still for half a second before lifting; the stroke snaps to a clean shape in the same ink. Lift without holding and it stays exactly as you drew it. Undo puts the original stroke back.

Yes. From a selected verse, choose Image to create a styled verse card you can post or send.

The New King James, NASB, Christian Standard Bible, New Living Translation and The Message are licensed by their publishers, and those licenses don't let their wording be copied out of the app. Rather than send you away with just a reference, The Pillar sends the same passage in a public-domain translation and labels it as that translation — the King James for the New King James, whose text it is based on, and otherwise the Berean where you have it saved, or the King James, which is always on your device. The action bar tells you which one before you tap. Sharing from a public-domain translation sends exactly what you were reading.

For the same licensing reason — but an export is a record of your own study, so substituting another translation across a whole notebook would misrepresent what you actually wrote against. Licensed quotations export as their reference; your own writing is complete, and public-domain quotations export in full with no limit.

Subscriptions are billed by Apple or Google, not by us. On iPhone and iPad, they're managed in your Apple Account: Settings → your name → Subscriptions, and refund requests go through Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com. On Android, open Google Play, tap your profile picture, then Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions; refunds go through Google Play too. Either way, cancel at least 24 hours before a renewal date to avoid being charged for the next period.

No. Apple and Google each bill for their own store, and neither can see a subscription bought from the other, so a subscription from the App Store unlocks The Pillar on your iPhone and iPad, and one from Google Play unlocks it on your Android devices.

Tap Restore at the top of that screen — it re-checks your Apple Account or Google Play account for an active subscription. Make sure you're signed in with the same account you subscribed with. If it still doesn't unlock, email us.

Yes. There is no Pillar account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. The only sign-in involved is the account you already buy apps with — your Apple Account, or your Google account on Android — and the store tells the app nothing about you but whether a subscription is active. Notes, highlights and recordings never reach a server we control. The privacy policy has the details, and the principles say why.