A worship app that earns a place in someone's morning
SOZO Communications is a 501(c)(3) in eastern North Carolina with a big idea and a small team. We designed their worship app, built the content model behind it, and shipped it to both stores.
- Role
- Product design, content model, launch
- Type
- Consumer audio app, iOS and Android
- Client
- SOZO Communications, Inc., a 501(c)(3)
- Status
- Live on both stores
- App Store rating
- 4.8★
- Stores, one release
- 2
- Daily habits in one app
- 3
- Download size
- 26.8 MB
Radio has a range. A phone does not.
Johnny Jones started SOZO RADIO on a simple observation. People reach for worship music in the car, at their desk, doing the dishes, at 2am when they cannot sleep. Those moments are scattered through an ordinary day and almost none of them happen in front of a radio.
The organisation had the music, the writing, and a podcast already in production. What it did not have was a way to put all three in someone's pocket. It also had the constraints you would expect from a nonprofit: no in-house product team, no engineering budget to speak of, and a launch that needed to happen this year rather than next.
- Three separate content streams with no single home
- No in-house design or product function
- A nonprofit budget, and a real deadline
Open it, press play, and get on with your day.
Almost everyone opens this app with the same intention, so the player is the home screen. Album art, one large play button, and the track that is on right now. Nothing to configure, nothing to browse first.
Underneath it sit two rails. Recently Played gives people a way back to a song that caught them, which turned out to matter more than any search feature we could have added. Below that, the SOZO TODAY Devotional rail puts the day's reading one thumb-reach from the music, which is the whole argument for the two living in the same app.
The catalogue does the rest of the persuading. Passion, Elevation Worship, Bethel Music, Phil Wickham, Brandon Lake, Tasha Layton. When a listener recognises three artists in the first five seconds, you do not need an onboarding tour.
The devotional is what brings people back tomorrow.
Music gets someone to download an app. A daily reading is what makes them open it again on a Tuesday. Each devotional follows the One Year Bible reading plan, pairs a passage with a short reflection, and carries its own artwork so a week of them reads as a series rather than a wall of text.
We designed the content model around what the team could actually sustain. Every piece is one record: title, scripture reference, artwork, body, and date. The SOZO TODAY Podcast, hosted by Johnny, Jen, and Joel, drops into the same structure. Nobody at SOZO has to open a ticket or ring us to publish, which was the point.
- One content model covering devotionals and podcast episodes
- Artwork per entry, so the daily rail reads as a series
- Published by the SOZO team without engineering involvement
Free to start, and genuinely easy to leave.
New listeners get a seven day trial, and the sign-up runs through sozoradio.org rather than through in-app purchase. That decision keeps store commission out of a nonprofit's donation income, and it means the app and the website share one account rather than two.
The other half of that bargain is that leaving has to be easy. Cancel sits in Settings. So does Delete Account, spelled out plainly instead of buried behind a support email. The app also ships with an empty Apple privacy label, because it genuinely does not collect anything. For an organisation whose entire proposition is trust, hiding the exit would have cost more than the churn it prevented.
- Seven day trial, sign-up handled on the web
- Cancel and delete account both visible in Settings
- Apple privacy label reads no data collected
One release, two stores, and a team that can run it.
SOZO RADIO is live on the App Store and Google Play, holding 4.8 stars, and running on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro from the same build. It is 26.8 MB, free to download, and rated 9+. CarPlay is next, which is the request that comes up most from a listenership that does a lot of driving.
The part we are most pleased with is invisible. A four-person ministry publishes a devotional every morning, releases a podcast episode, and updates the rotation, without needing us in the loop.
What we built it with
A design and delivery engagement rather than a from-scratch build. We chose an app platform that could carry the product, and spent the budget on the parts listeners actually touch.
iOS
App Store
Android
Google Play
Figma
Wix
What shipped
- Player, devotionals, and podcast unified in one daily habit
- Content model the SOZO team publishes to without developer help
- Seven day trial with web sign-up, keeping store fees off donations
- Cancel and account deletion surfaced in plain sight
- Store listings, artwork, and copy produced for both platforms
- Shipped to iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro from one build
Want results like these?
Book a free 30-minute call. We'll scope your project, recommend the right approach, and tell you honestly if we're the right fit.