Why Another Bible App?

YouVersion has billions of installs. Logos has spent decades indexing every commentary ever written. The Bible app market is completely saturated.

So yeah, why build another one?

The Streaming Problem

Think about how you use Netflix. You scroll through options, find something that looks interesting, watch it, and move on to the next thing. The whole interface is designed to keep you consuming. Big thumbnails, autoplay, "Continue Watching" suggestions. It optimizes for throughput.

Most Bible apps feel like this to me. Reading plans that keep you moving forward each day. Devotionals that reset tomorrow. Highlights that mark what you've consumed. The whole experience is built around consistency and completion, which honestly isn't a bad thing. Reading through Scripture regularly is valuable.

But I wasn't trying to stream the Bible. I was trying to understand it.

What Understanding Actually Looks Like

Understanding doesn't happen in a linear stream. It happens in layers over time. You read Romans 3 and something clicks about justification. Two weeks later you're in Genesis 15 and Abraham's faith connects back to what you learned in Romans. A month later Galatians 2 makes both of those passages sharper. Six months in, you start seeing the pattern everywhere.

That's not consumption, that's construction. You're building something (a mental framework, a web of connections, your own interpretive structure). And I needed a tool that was built for that kind of work, not just for moving through content.

Why Existing Tools Didn't Work

Most bible apps are great for reading, but terrible for connecting ideas. Highlights don't link passages together. Notes just live in chronological lists. You can't actually see the web of understanding you're building.

Logos is an incredible research tool, but it's overwhelming for the daily study I wanted. I wanted to capture my own insights, without paying a subscription. Different use case entirely.

Obsidian got really close. I actually spent months building a system there, and it worked pretty well. But I found myself spending more time maintaining the system than actually studying. Manually formatting verse references, maintaining templates, fixing broken links when I reorganized things. The tool became the work instead of enabling the work.

What I really wanted was Obsidian's philosophy (networked notes, plain text files, local-first) but without the constant maintenance tax.

What Forge Actually Does

The whole thing is built around three ideas:

Atomic insights

When something clicks while you're reading, you capture just that one observation in a note. Not a journal entry, not a paragraph of highlighted verses, just the specific thing you understood. Over time these atomic notes pile up and become this library of reusable, searchable, combinable insights that actually compound in value.

Visual memory

When you open a passage, you can immediately see little markers showing everywhere you've already studied. Click one and your note appears right there in context. You're not searching through folders or switching apps. Your understanding lives inside the text itself.

You own everything

Every note is just a markdown file sitting on your hard drive. You can open it in VS Code, version control it with git, sync it to iCloud, email it to a friend. Whatever you want. There's no cloud dependency, no vendor lock-in, no subscription holding your thoughts hostage. It's just files. Your files.

How It Works in Practice

Say you're reading John 3, the "born again" conversation with Nicodemus. Something clicks about how Nicodemus responds to Jesus. You create a note and write down what you saw. Done.

Next week you're reading Ezekiel 36 and God promises to give people a new heart. You remember your note about Nicodemus and link them together. Later when you're back in John 3, you see your note marker. Click it and the Ezekiel connection pops up right there. The connection is preserved in context, whenever you need it.

Instead of just consuming Scripture, you're actively building your understanding of it.

Who This Is For

If reading plans work for you, honestly keep using them. If you need Greek lexicons and detailed word studies, Logos is probably better for that. If you've built the perfect Obsidian setup and it's working, genuinely respect that. I tried and couldn't make it stick.

But if you've been frustrated by tools that seem optimized for the wrong thing, if you want to build your own understanding instead of consuming someone else's insights, if you value local-first and plain text but don't want to spend your weekends configuring plugins and maintaining templates... this might be worth trying.

What I'm Building Next

I use this every day and it works for me. But there's definitely more I want to build. A graph view to see your entire network of notes at once, full-text search across everything, optional sync for people who want it (but local-first always), easier ways to share notes with study groups, and maybe integration with commentaries so you can pull in external resources when you actually want them.

Shipping regularly. Feedback welcome.

Try It

Download it, open Genesis 1, create a note, and see how it feels. It's completely free, no account required, no tracking. Just the tool.

If it clicks for you, great. If it doesn't, no hard feelings. Different tools work for different people. But if you've been looking for something like this, it's here.

Pj