SoapBox Prayer 1.2.0 — Listen, Read, Reflect

On Monday, April 6, we launched SoapBox Prayer on Product Hunt. Three days later, we're shipping version 1.2.0 — the biggest update since I rebuilt the app from scratch.

The short version: we shipped an Audio Bible, redesigned the explorer experience, made the whole app roughly 10x faster to open, and fixed a handful of bugs that were death by a thousand cuts. Here's everything that's new.

🎧 NEW: Audio Bible

The headline feature of 1.2.0 is an Audio Bible that actually respects how people live.

You can browse the entire Bible by Book → Chapter → Verse and let SoapBox read it aloud. Switch between NIV, KJV, NLT, NASB, and more. Pick from 12 different voices — 5 free iOS system voices and 7 premium ElevenLabs studio voices. Tap any voice to hear a 6-second preview before you commit.

• Adjustable speed from 0.5× to 2.0× with live changes that pick up where you left off
• Lock-screen and CarPlay controls so you can listen hands-free
• Background playback — audio keeps going when you switch tabs or lock your phone
• Continue Listening — close the app and resume near where you stopped when you come back

Every design decision came back to one question: "What happens when someone is driving?" or "What happens when someone is winding down before bed?" The app had to work for both moments.

🎧 NEW: Read + Listen Together

Open any chapter of the Bible and you see the verse text on screen alongside the audio player. The currently-playing verse highlights in real-time as it's read aloud — perfect for follow-along reading, for people learning English, or for anyone who wants to see and hear scripture at the same time.

Tap any verse (or select multiple) and you get six actions: Listen, Journal, Copy, Share, Pray, or Ask ORA. Switch translations on the fly without losing your place. Long-press any chapter to play just a verse range.

🎧 NEW: 5 Audio-First Reading Plans

We seeded five new reading plans specifically designed to be listened to, not read:

• 10-Minute Morning Listen — 30 days, beginner-friendly
• Psalms for Commutes — 60 days
• Bedtime Gospels — 28 days
• Wisdom Walk: Proverbs — 31 days
• Full New Testament Listen-Through — 90 days, advanced

Built for the moments when your eyes are busy but your heart is open.

🔍 NEW: Discover Tab

For the people on SoapBox who are exploring faith privately, we built a new Discover tab. No public profile. No social pressure. No timer counting down to when you're "allowed" to see communities.

Instead, the tab surfaces nearby churches via proximity search across our database of 218,000 geocoded US churches. It shows welcoming communities curated for seekers. It lets you join with an invite code. And it has an invite-friends CTA so you can bring someone along on the journey if you want to.

Privacy is on by default for explorer users. Profile hidden. Location hidden. Activity hidden. We built this path for people who need space to figure things out, not for people who want to be sold on faith.

🌱 NEW: Faith Journey Progression

We replaced the rigid 7-day community unlock with a 5-stage visual faith journey: Curious → Exploring → Understanding → Believing → Growing.

Your stage adapts to what you actually do — write journal entries, pray, join communities — instead of a timer. The app meets you where you are.

This was the single biggest shift in how the explorer path works, and it came directly from user feedback during the Product Hunt launch.

📱 NEW: Shareable Profile Links + QR Codes

Every user can now set a username and share their profile with a QR code or link. Your profile lives at soapboxsuperapp.com/u/{username} with a real landing page and an "Open in SoapBox" deep link.

We also redesigned the verse share cards with editorial typography, gold accents, and a real Apple App Store badge. When you share a verse, recipients see a rich preview in iMessage, WhatsApp, and Twitter — with the actual scripture text and a beautiful card.

⚡ 10× Faster Loading

Cold start time in 1.1.x was around 10 seconds. In 1.2.0, it's 1-2 seconds.

How we got there: AuthManager now unblocks the splash screen on session validation while the profile loads in the background. TodayViewModel hydrates from a disk cache and refreshes in the background. Push notification permissions use a fast-path that skips re-prompts. Mixpanel initialization moved off the main thread. Realtime channels lazy-load.

None of this is visible — it's the kind of engineering you only notice when it's broken. But it makes the app feel dramatically better to use.

🙏 Bug Fixes

And the bug fixes. Every founder has a "thousand cuts" list after launch, and we worked through the worst ones:

• Prayer duplication across circles (the one that was driving everyone crazy)
• ORA getting stuck in "thinking" mode
• Voice selection reverting on Done
• Pause button stuck after switching readings
• Speed slider not applying live
• Continue Listening duplicates
• Share card verse duplication in iMessage
• Three-word book name regex (Song of Solomon)
• Audio plan empty state

Thank you to everyone who reported these. Every single one came from a user message.

A Note on Pacing

Shipping a release this big three days after a public launch is unusual. Most teams would have scheduled it for a month out. We didn't, because the Product Hunt launch gave us the single most valuable thing a founder can get — real users generating real feedback in real time. Waiting a month to act on that would have been a waste of every conversation we had that week.

This release is the version of SoapBox Prayer I wish we had launched with on Monday. If you downloaded it during our Product Hunt launch, please update and let me know what you think. I'm reading every response, and every piece of feedback shapes what we ship next.

— Alan