Today I am highlight the app called Missio. This app was launched in May of this year by Pope Francis and the Pontifical Mission Societies. According to their facebook page, the app
“features the Pope’s daily homily, news and video from Rome and around the world. First App to be launched by a Pope!”
The app provides articles that highlight the missionary work of the Church and incorporates news articles from the Vatican that are also available in the Pope App. You can then share the articles via e-mail, text, Facebook, Twitter, make a copy or print. The app is available in English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Arabic. It is available for free in Android and iOS versions.
The app also features the ability to donate to the Pontifical Mission Society. I do wish that the donation could be made within the app rather than be redirected to another site. It would have been really convenient to be able to pay with Paypal rather than filling out a form and providing credit card information. Since the app is available throughout the world, I am sure that they would run into the problem of finding one payment provider that works in all of these countries.
The apps design is really clean, modern, and simple which is always great! One more thing I would tweak is that fact that you cannot switch languages within the app. The app is automatically downloaded in the language that your phone is set up in. Since I often work with two languages, English and Spanish, it would have been great if I could switch to Spanish or if it allowed you to used multiple languages as I would like to share the articles in both languages. Overall it is a neat app and a great way for Pope Francis to model how we can use new mediums of communication for evangelization and missionary work.
