De Fide

A free, open-source Catholic app for Android. No tracking, no accounts, no internet required.

Features

• Bible — Douay-Rheims (1899), World English Bible (Catholic), Latin Vulgate, Latin Vulgate (English Translation), Bíblia Ave-Maria (pt-BR), and Bíblia dos Capuchinhos (pt-PT), plus support for importing your own translations from JSON
• Catechism — Catechism of the Catholic Church (online via browser) and Baltimore Catechism (offline)
• Divine Office / Breviary — Latin Divine Office from the DivinumOfficium project, with antiphons, hymns, psalms, readings, and prayers for Lauds, Vespers, and Matins
• Rosary — Guided sessions for all four mysteries with bead indicator and scripture references
• Prayers — Traditional Catholic prayers with tag-based browsing
• Novenas — Nine-day prayer tracker with progress persistence
• Home screen — Verse of the Day and today's suggested Rosary mystery
• Localization — English, Português (Brasil), and Português (Portugal)

Philosophy

De Fide is built on three principles:

1. Fully offline — all content ships with the app, no network calls ever
2. No data collection — no analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts
3. FOSS only — all Bible translations are public domain or license-free; the app is AGPL-3.0

Importing Your Own Bible

De Fide only bundles translations that are public domain or freely licensed. If you have a copy of another translation as JSON (for example an NRSVUE dump), you can import it on-device. Imported translations get full-text search, Verse of the Day, bookmarks, highlights, and reading progress, just like the built-in ones.

How: Settings > Bible Translation > "Import translation (JSON)", pick the file, and give the translation a name. Re-importing under the same name replaces the previous copy. The delete icon next to an imported translation removes it again.

Expected format: a single JSON object organized testament > book > chapter > verse:

{
  "Old Testament": {
    "Genesis": {
      "1": {
        "1": "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.",
        "2": "The earth was without form and void..."
      },
      "2": { "1": "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished." }
    }
  },
  "New Testament": {
    "Matthew": { "1": { "1": "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ..." } }
  },
  "Deuterocanonical": {
    "Tobit": { "1": { "1": "The book of the words of Tobit..." } }
  }
}

Format details:

• Top-level keys are testaments: Old Testament, New Testament, and Deuterocanonical. The section label used by NRSVUE-style dumps for the deuterocanonical books is also recognized, so those files work unmodified. Deuterocanonical books appear in the app's Old Testament section, in canonical order.
• Book names are matched case-insensitively against standard English names and mapped to the app's canonical book numbering, so reading progress lines up across translations. Common variants are accepted (Psalm/Psalms, Song of Songs/Song of Solomon/Canticles, Wisdom/Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, Douay-Rheims names like Isaias), as are additional books outside the 73-book canon that some dumps include (1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, Letter of Jeremiah, Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151). Unrecognized books are still imported and listed after the known ones.
• Chapter and verse keys must be numeric strings ("1", "2", ...).
• Leading superscript verse numbers (¹ ² ³) in verse text are stripped automatically, so dumps that embed them work as-is.
• Imported translations are stored in a separate on-device database and are never uploaded anywhere. They are not included in app backups, so keep the JSON file if you might want to re-import it on a new device.
• Only import texts you have the right to use. Copyrighted translations are for your personal use only and must not be redistributed.

Building

Requires Android Studio or the Android SDK with Gradle.

git clone https://github.com/joshbowyer/DeFide.git
cd DeFide
git submodule update --init --recursive  # clone the DivinumOfficium source
./gradlew assembleDebug

The build automatically runs scripts/compile_content.py (which pulls from the DivinumOfficium submodule) before assembling, so no manual steps are needed.

Tech Stack

• Kotlin + Jetpack Compose
• Hilt (dependency injection)
• Room (user data — bookmarks, novena progress, rosary sessions)
• Raw SQLite (read-only content database, bypasses Room to support FTS4)
• DataStore (preferences)

Contributing

Translations

UI translations are managed on Weblate:

hosted.weblate.org/projects/de-fide/app-strings

If you'd like to improve an existing translation or add a new language, you can contribute directly through the Weblate interface without any coding required.

Content (prayers, novenas, rosary)

Prayers, novenas, and rosary meditations live in the content/ directory as JSON files, organized by language. Pull requests with corrections or new content are welcome.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only — see LICENSE.