JW BIBLIOTECA ONLINE

JW Biblioteca Online provides the Bible in app form for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Jehovah’s Witnesses is a Christian denomination with certain beliefs that diverge from mainstream Christianity. This denomination uses its own Bible translation, which is called the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. This app provides the full text from that translation.

The text is fully translated into three languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish. When you log in to the app, large buttons let you easily pick your language. You can also set it as a preference so that your preferred language is applied by automatically, and switching language on the fly is supported as well.

The layout is well done. The black text on a white background is easy to read. Other parts of the app use a beige or light blue background, and the blue is reserved for user interface elements and the like. You are able to change some of these colors if, for instance, you require a high contrast aesthetic. The text also features inline annotations, and these are clickable links that will bring you to that resource.

JW Biblioteca Online contains much more than just the Bible. It has a full index, and it provides many additional references. These are often cited in the text, but you can access them directly. There are also help files that cover usage of every supported feature.

The app has a search box at the top of every page. Search is very fast and highly accurate in our experience. Search results were sometimes quite long, and it would be nice if the app had a way that those results could be further refined.

Fortunately, the app does support bookmarks, so when you find something you want to refer to later, you can tag it. You are also able to create your own references. This is helpful if you want to, for instance, annotate a particular page with a reference to another page.

JW Biblioteca Online even has a built-in calendar. Regular users can use the calendar to plan out their readings or to follow along with a study guide. We also imagine that it can be quite helpful for preachers and teachers who want to plan out their sermons and lessons.

The app connects online in order to update. The app is updated on a regular basis, and you can set it to automatically update or request updates manually. Updates finish quickly, and at this point, the app is quite polished. We didn’t experience any bugs or stability issues, but features are still being added.

Our biggest gripe with JW Biblioteca Online is the in-app advertising. While we’re not opposed to ad-supported freeware, these ads persist on every single page you read, and we imagine that this can prove quite distracting to the person trying to focus on the text.

Pros

• Bible app for Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Several languages

Cons

• Advertising