Nephi Plates
One verse. One quiet moment.
A one-verse-at-a-time scripture reader for all five standard works. Swipe like a feed, study with AI-assisted insights, grow a faith tracker and pray for others in a shared prayer room.
Client
R5IoT (in-house product)
Year
2026
Type
App · Faith
Platforms
Stack
The problem
Scripture apps are built for looking things up. You open a chapter, scroll a wall of text and close it. People who scroll a feed all day find it hard to slow down and actually read.
Nephi Plates shows one verse per screen and lets you swipe to the next, like a social feed. Each verse has study help one tap away, so a quick read can turn into real study.
What we built
Nephi Plates is our own app, free on the App Store and Google Play, with an optional supporter subscription that unlocks nothing extra. It covers all five standard works of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is independent and unofficial.
Reading, highlights, study plans and the Faith tracker work offline with no account. Signing in adds sync across devices and a shared prayer room. There's also on-device verse scanning from a photo, typo-tolerant search and a map of how every chapter connects to the others.
- Verses, one per screen
- 41,995
- Study sections per verse
- 14
- Releases in 4 weeks
- 7
- Cross-references mapped
- ~200k
What took the most work
01
Study help without runaway AI costs
Claude wrote study notes for four of the five volumes ahead of time, and they ship inside the app, so reading them costs nothing. Old Testament notes are written the first time someone opens a verse, through a server function that keeps the API key off the phone, and then cached for everyone.
02
Keeping the AI accurate
Topics have to come from an approved list, explanations are capped in length and told to avoid speculation, and a suggested related verse only becomes a link if that verse actually exists. Conference talk links come from real footnotes, never from the model.
03
A swipe that feels right
After a flick, the snap to the next verse takes 180 to 340 ms depending on how fast you swiped, using the same easing as the word-by-word reveal.
04
Highlights as precise as Kindle
Handles move one character at a time without splitting accents, curly quotes or emoji, and each has a 44px touch target. Highlights that touch merge into one, in any of 15 colors.
Where it is now
Nephi Plates went from first commit on August 4, 2026 to the App Store, with Google Play live on October 6. It's on version 1.7. A companion app, Nephi Daily, uses the same account for a five-minute daily routine.
Highlights
Feed-style reading
Vertical swipe through scripture with momentum-scaled settling and a word-by-word reveal.
14 study lenses
Glossary, word study, symbolism, historical setting and more for every verse.
Kindle-grade highlights
Character-precise handles, multi-span selections, 15 colors, tags and private notes.
Offline first
Reading, saves and progress work with no account; sign-in syncs across devices.
Inside Nephi Plates
8 images
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