The Catholic prayer app Hallow has made history by becoming the first religious app to reach the No. 1 spot on Apple’s app store. It reached the top spot on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024, which was the same day its Lent Pray40 prayer challenge started.
More than one million people joined the Lenten prayer challenge. Hallow app surpassed the e-commerce app, Temu, which previously held the No. 1 spot, on Wednesday evening, and held its top ranking into Thursday morning. With roughly 85 employees, the Catholic app is a significantly smaller company than those creating apps who tend to rank high in the App Store.
This Lent, Hallow, the app, will walk its listeners through “He Leadeth Me” by Father Walter J. Ciszek, a Jesuit priest and missionary who was imprisoned for 20 years in the Soviet Union amid some of the worst conditions imaginable.
The book rose to No. 2 overall in Amazon’s list of bestsellers during the same time frame. It currently sits at the No. 3 spot.
“We’re blown away. When we started Hallow, it would’ve been crazy for us to imagine a thousand people praying together on it, much less 1 million. God is doing incredible things. All glory and credit and praise belongs to him,” Alex Jones, CEO and co-founder of Hallow, said in a press release.
“Never in a million years would I have imagined we’d be at the top of the App Store,” Jones added. “The other folks in the top 100 apps are just such incredible and popular apps with tens of thousands of employees — Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Google, Instagram. What a crazy world.”
The spike in downloads comes after Hallow aired a 30-second commercial on February 11, 2024, during Super Bowl LVIII featuring the Kansas City Chiefs, and the San Francisco 49ers, encouraging viewers to take a moment to give thanks to God and invite them to join Hallow in prayer this Lenten season.