Support.

Something not working, a question, or a thing you wish Pray did? Write to us. There is no ticket queue and no bot in front of it: the address on this page reaches the people who made the app, and one of them writes back.

Write to us

The one address for anything to do with Pray is pray@pastsunday.com. Write in whatever words you have. You do not need a subject line that sounds official, and there is no form to fill in first.

Nothing about it is automated, so what comes back is a person writing rather than a receipt. If you have written and heard nothing at all, write again; the miss will be ours rather than yours.

What to tell us when something is wrong

Pray keeps what you write on your phone and sends us nothing, which is the whole idea of it. It also means we cannot look at your side from here: there is no account to inspect and no log with your name in it. So a bug report is worth exactly what you put in it. The more of this you can give us, the faster we find the cause:

• Which phone you are using, and which version of iOS or Android it is running.
• What you did, in the order you did it, just before it went wrong.
• What you expected to happen, and what happened instead.
• Whether it happens every time, or happened once.
• A screenshot, if it is something you can see. Cover anything you would rather we did not read; we do not need the words of a prayer to fix the screen it sits on.

Getting Pray

Pray is out. It is on the App Store for iPhone and on Google Play for Android, it is free, and the two ways in are these:

Nothing is asked of you at the other end of either one. There is no account to make, no address to hand over, and no trial to start. Install it, open it, and pray.

What it costs

Nothing. Pray is free on iPhone and on Android: no subscription, no in-app purchases, no upgrade that unlocks the good part, and no advertising anywhere in it. There is no trial to run out, because there is nothing waiting on the other side of one.

Whether you need an account

You do not. There is no sign-up, no password, and no email address to hand over before you can pray. You open the app and start. That is not a convenience feature; it is the reason we can tell you honestly that we know nothing about you.

Working offline, and using more than one device

Pray works with no signal at all, on a plane or in a basement, because it never needed the network in the first place. The other side of that is real and worth knowing before you start: what you write lives on the phone you wrote it on, and it does not appear on your other devices. If syncing between your own devices is ever added, the privacy page will say what moved and where it went before that version ships.

If you get a new phone, or lose the one you have

On iPhone, your journal is carried in the device backup, so a new phone restored or migrated from that backup comes up with your prayers in it. Pray keeps them in ordinary app storage and puts nothing in the keychain, which is what makes them part of the backup you already take; there is nothing to switch on inside the app for that to be true, and nothing about it sends anything to us. Set up the new phone from your backup and the prayers, the updates, the verses and the line you breathe with are all there.

Android does it the other way round, and in your favour on the question that matters most. Pray keeps its journal out of the cloud backup Android would otherwise take, so nothing you write is ever uploaded to Google Drive or anywhere else. What carries it to a new phone is the transfer you do at setup, straight from the old phone to the new one rather than down from a server. The trade is worth knowing before you need it: there is no copy waiting in the cloud, so if the old phone is lost or wiped before you move, the transfer has nothing to read from.

Either way, that arrangement is between you and your phone, not something we are part of. We hold no copy of anything, so if the backup is gone, or is older than the prayer you are looking for, or the old phone went into the river, we are not a second place to ask. Exporting is the answer to all of it, and it is the next section.

Taking your prayers with you

Settings has Export everything, under Your prayers. It builds a plain text file of every prayer, shows it to you in full before it goes anywhere, and then hands it out through the ordinary share sheet, so you can save it to Files, mail it to yourself, or keep it wherever you keep things that matter. The file carries the updates you added over the months and the lines you wrote to breathe with, not just the opening sentence, because a record missing those is not the record. Nothing is uploaded to us at any point in that.

Import a file is the other half of it, in the same place: it reads a file you exported and adds what is in it, and nothing already in the app is replaced. Between the two, your prayers can move to a new phone by hand if you ever need them to, and they sit in a format that will outlive the app.

When the daily reminder does not arrive

Almost always this is the phone holding it back rather than Pray failing to send it. Work down the list for your phone in order; the wording moves a little between versions, but the settings sit in the same places.

On iPhone, it is usually one of four things:

• Open Settings, then Notifications, find Pray in the list, and check that Allow Notifications is on.
• Check that the time you set in the app is the time you meant, morning against evening included.
• Check whether a Focus is running at that hour. Sleep and Do Not Disturb both hold notifications back, and a scheduled Focus can cover the exact part of the day you chose to pray in.
• Check Scheduled Summary, under Settings then Notifications. If Pray has been put in it, iOS gathers the reminder up and delivers it later with everything else.

On Android, the same causes wear different names, and there is a fifth that is Android's alone:

• Open Settings, then Notifications, then App settings, find Pray, and check its notifications are allowed. Android asks for that permission separately from installing the app, and it can be switched off again later.
• Check that the time you set in the app is the time you meant, morning against evening included.
• Check whether Do Not Disturb, or a Bedtime or Driving mode, is running at that hour. Any of them can cover the exact part of the day you chose to pray in.
• In the same place as the first step, check the individual kind of notification is not set to Silent. Android keeps a switch per kind as well as one for the app as a whole.
• Check the battery setting for Pray, under Settings, then Apps, then Pray, then Battery. Restricted lets the phone hold the reminder back indefinitely; Optimised and Unrestricted both let it through.

One more thing about Android, and we would rather say it here than let you wonder. The daily bell rings near the time you picked rather than exactly on it, and that is a choice rather than a fault. Ringing to the second needs the exact-alarm permission, which Google keeps for alarm clocks and calendars, and a quiet invitation to pray is neither of those. So it arrives around the hour you chose, sometimes a little after if the phone has been asleep. The app says the same thing where you set the time.

If all of that is right and it still does not come, that is a bug rather than a setting, and we want to hear about it.

Putting Pray on your home screen

On iPhone, touch and hold an empty part of the home screen until the icons jiggle, then add a widget and search for Pray. On Android, touch and hold an empty part of the home screen, tap Widgets, find Pray, and drag it where you want it.

Android has a second way in that iPhone does not: a Pray tile in Quick Settings. Swipe down twice from the top of the screen, tap the pencil to edit the tiles, and drag Pray up into the ones you use.

Whichever you add, it never goes off and never asks for anything; it sits there, and one tap opens straight into praying. If you would rather not be reminded at a set time, this is the gentler way in.

Deleting what you wrote

Deleting the app from your phone deletes everything in it, and there is no copy on our side to ask us about afterwards. On iPhone there is one thing worth remembering: a device backup taken before you deleted the app still holds what was in it then, which is the same fact that saves you when you change phones. That backup is yours to manage in your iPhone's own settings, not something we can reach into. On Android there is nothing of that kind to remember, because Pray keeps its journal out of the cloud backup in the first place. Export first, on either phone, if there is anything you want to keep.

If you were testing Pray before it came out

Then you prayed with it first, and it is better for it. Thank you. Testing did not end at launch: stay in and you keep seeing each new version before everyone else, from TestFlight on iPhone or from the tester track on Google Play, exactly as you have been. Leave whenever you like, from the same place you joined, and the public app is waiting in the store when you do. Nothing you wrote moves or is lost either way; it has been on your phone the whole time.

If something is broken or hard or simply wrong, keep telling us. That was the point of the beta and it is still the point now, and it is the fastest your word will ever travel to the people who made it.

Coming off our email list

If you left your address on this site before Pray shipped, you were promised two emails and no more: your invitation to the beta, and word on the day Pray went public. Both have been sent, so nothing further is coming. If you would rather the address were gone anyway, you can take it off in a moment at pastsunday.com/pray/support/unsubscribe: type the address you signed up with, and the row is deleted rather than hidden. Writing to us works just as well, and you do not owe us a reason either way.

Asking for something Pray does not do

Please do, and early. It helps most if you tell us what you were trying to do rather than the feature you had in mind, because the need underneath is usually the more useful half of it.

It is only fair to say what Pray will not become, so that you are not waiting on it. There are no streaks and no score, because a number that grades your praying is a bad thing to hand someone. There is nothing to share into and no feed, because this is between you and God. And what you write stays on your phone, so anything that would need a server is something we will most likely say no to.

If Pray is hard to use

Tell us, and we will treat it as a bug rather than a request. If something fights VoiceOver, if the text will not grow with Dynamic Type, if the motion is too much, or if a control is too small to hit reliably, that is a fault in what we made and not in how you use your phone. Say which screen and what happened, and we will fix it.

Pray is not care

Pray is a place to pray, and nothing more than that. It is not pastoral care, counselling, medical advice, or mental-health treatment, and it is not a crisis service. Nobody reads what you write and nobody is waiting on the other end of it, and that is by design rather than by neglect.

If you are in danger or in real distress, please tell a person today: someone who loves you, your pastor, a doctor, or your local emergency or crisis line. Writing to the address on this page is not a way to reach help quickly, because nobody is watching that inbox around the clock. An app is a poor substitute for the church, and we built this one on the assumption that you have one.

Privacy and terms

What we hold, which is almost nothing, is set out on the privacy page. The agreement for using the app is on the terms page. Both are written in plain language, both are linked at the foot of every page here, and if either one reads as though it is hiding something, that is worth an email too.

If you meant PastSunday, not Pray

PastSunday is the other half of what we make: a tool for churches that helps a Sunday sermon keep speaking through the week. If your question is about that rather than about Pray, write to hello@pastsunday.com, or start at pastsunday.com. Both addresses reach us, so nothing is lost by picking the wrong one; the split only gets your question to the right person sooner.

Anything at all, even if you are not sure it is a bug: write to pray@pastsunday.com and a person will write back.