Vincent Horn is the founder of Buddhist Geeks and a longtime observer of the Buddhist app world.

With 750,000 regular users, Insight Timer includes hundreds of talks and guided meditations, customizable sounds, and 2,500 spiritual discussion groups. Mainstream yoga and mindfulness apps, on the other hand, are wildly popular. Most of these, Shotwell explains, are created by and for small sanghas that have no intention of marketing them to a mass audience, so they tend to be rudimentary and buggy. Other Buddhist apps include digital dictionaries, prayer books, scriptures, malas, timers, and bells. “If you are making a product, you want your users to need to buy your product.” He wanted the opposite-an app that users would realize they don’t need. “From a Buddhist perspective, you have everything you need to fully realize the teachings without needing to buy an app,” says Shotwell. In designing the app, Shotwell discovered the key challenge that all Buddhist app developers face. Programmer Gordon Shotwell launched a new addition to the app world last year: the Shambhala Meditation App, which uses a drag-and-drop interface to let users arrange their own routine of talks, timers, and gong sounds. So far, however, developers haven’t made many apps specifically for Buddhists. In America in 2017, we spend more than one and a half days on our phones each month, and there are 1.5 million apps available for the more than one billion Apple devices in use around the world. However, like some other popular secular meditation apps-Dan Harris’s 10% Happier, Matthieu Ricard’s Imagine Clarity, and Rohan Gunatillake’s Buddhify-Breathe is made by Buddhists, based on Buddhist teachings. Based on my answers, it recommends a few guided meditations for me-top among them is a nine-minute meditation called “Great Compassion.”īreathe, as the app is called for short, isn’t made for Buddhists, per se. Next, the app asks me some questions about my mental, emotional, and physical state. Below the text is another button: “Dim screen for ten seconds.” I tap and go into ten seconds of contemplation. Take a deep breath, and think about how your mind and body feel. I select Stop, Breathe & Think on my iPad, and the app opens to a friendly drawing of a meditator, next to a large “Begin” button, which I tap.

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