Sojourner on Your Phone

In your browser

The Same Sojourner, Anywhere

Sojourner now runs in a web browser, on a phone, a tablet, or a computer. It is the same Bible study companion as the Windows and Linux program, with the same Bibles, commentaries, confessions, Hebrew and Greek, atlas, and notes. There is nothing to buy and nothing to fetch from an app store.

Open app.gentleking.org (opens in a new tab) and it is there. It is what is called a progressive web app. That means you can put it on your home screen or in your dock, and from then on it opens in its own window like any other app. After your first visit, it will offer to do that for you.

Installing it

Putting It on Your Home Screen

1. iPhone and iPad. Open it in Safari or Chrome. Tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen. Please do this. Safari clears a website’s data after a week or so without a visit, but it keeps an app that lives on the home screen.
2. Android. Tap Install when the app offers. Or open the menu in Chrome, the three dots, and choose Install app.
3. Mac. In Safari, open the File menu and choose Add to Dock. That needs macOS Sonoma or later. In Chrome or Edge, click the install icon at the right of the address bar.
4. Windows and Linux. In Chrome or Edge, click the install icon in the address bar. Firefox cannot install web apps, but Sojourner works as it is in a Firefox tab. If you want everything on your own disk, the desktop program is still there.

Keep it open in one tab at a time. The app’s storage allows only one open copy, and a second tab will tell you so and offer to take over.

The library

The Books, and Using It Offline

The desktop program carries its whole library inside the installer. The web app fetches the Bibles, commentaries, lexicons, and reference works in small pieces as you open them, and keeps each piece on your device once you have read it. So it starts quickly and grows as you use it.

To use it with no connection at all, open Settings, choose Data and backups, and pick Use without the internet. That downloads the whole library, about 900 MB, and from then on the app works on a plane, in a waiting room, or anywhere the signal is gone.

The book shelves, the Puritans, the Church Fathers, and the rest, are added from Settings and read online. Keep on this device stores a single book for reading offline. The Atlas has its terrain and satellite maps built in.

Privacy

Your Notes Stay on Your Device

Your notes, highlights, prayers, and sermons are kept in your browser’s private storage on the device you are using, the way the desktop program keeps them in a file on your computer. There is no account and no sync. Nothing you read, search, write, or pray is sent anywhere.

The books come from data.gentleking.org. Cloudflare, which hosts both addresses, keeps ordinary request logs the way any web host does. The app itself sends nothing about you.

Honest limits

What the Web Version Leaves Out

Almost everything in the desktop program is here. A few things are not, because a browser cannot do them.

1. The natural reading voice. The desktop program reads aloud with a voice built into it. In the browser, Sojourner uses your device’s own voices instead.
2. Backups to a folder. Use Export instead, and keep the file somewhere safe.
3. Your own audio, video, and MOBI files. Your own EPUB and PDF books do work. They stay in the browser and are not part of an export.
4. Sync. Each device keeps its own notes. Export and Import carry them across.

If you want all of it on your own computer, with nothing fetched from anywhere, the Windows and Linux program is unchanged and free.

Try It Now

It costs nothing and asks nothing of you. Open it, read a chapter with Matthew Henry beside it, and see whether it helps you.