Laudate

What Laudate is

Laudate is a free iOS and Android app published by Aycka Soft that bundles a wide array of Catholic devotional and reference material into one download. The home screen is a grid of tiles — Liturgy of the Hours, Mass readings, Rosary, Stations, Chaplet, Catechism, Bible, Prayers, Saints, Podcasts, Confession — and tapping any tile drops you into that section. There is no account to create, no onboarding flow, no subscription decision. You install the app, open it, and the day's content is already waiting.

Under the hood, Laudate is essentially a beautifully comprehensive directory app. It pulls daily Mass readings from the USCCB feed, the Liturgy of the Hours from a Universalis-compatible source, the Catechism from a complete in-app text, and the Rosary from pre-recorded audio. None of that is groundbreaking individually. What makes Laudate Laudate is that all of it sits in one place, for free, on a single icon — which is exactly what most Catholic users actually want.

Why everyday Catholics use Laudate

Most Catholic apps in 2026 are subscription products. Hallow is the obvious example — beautifully produced, celebrity-narrated, and around $70 per year. Ascension's app is similar. Even iBreviary, which is also free, focuses narrowly on the Hours and the Missal. Laudate is the one app that says: here is essentially everything a practicing Catholic touches in a normal week, and you don't have to pay for it.

That positioning matters more than it sounds. A parent with three kids, a parishioner on a fixed income, a college student walking into RCIA — none of them want to evaluate four different $70/year subscriptions before they can pray the Rosary on a Tuesday. Laudate removes that decision entirely. The trade is aesthetic: you give up the produced-podcast feel of Hallow, and in return you get the Hours, the readings, the Catechism, and the prayers, today, for nothing. For a large share of Catholic users, that trade is the right one — which is exactly why Laudate has stayed at the top of the free chart for more than a decade.

Liturgy of the Hours: the killer feature for free

The Liturgy of the Hours — the structured daily prayer cycle the Church has prayed for centuries — is the single most expensive thing to access digitally as a Catholic. A four-volume physical Breviary runs around $200. The widely-loved Universalis app charges a one-time fee. iBreviary is free but narrower. Laudate offers a complete Hours implementation — Office of Readings, Morning Prayer (Lauds), Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer (Vespers), and Night Prayer (Compline) — built directly into the app at no cost. For anyone trying to build a habit of praying the Hours, that alone is worth the install.

The experience is functional rather than fancy. You tap Liturgy of the Hours from the tile grid, choose the hour you want to pray, and the full text loads — antiphons, psalms, readings, intercessions, the Our Father, closing prayer. Feast days, memorials, and seasonal variations all flow through. It is the same text you would read in a printed Breviary, formatted for a phone screen. There are no audio recordings of someone praying it with you (Hallow does that), and the typography is plain. But it works, it loads quickly, and on a Tuesday at 6 a.m. when you want to pray Lauds before the kids wake up, plain and working is exactly what you need.

Daily Mass readings and the Catechism: reference that actually opens

Every morning, Laudate refreshes the day's Mass readings — the Old Testament reading, the Responsorial Psalm, the New Testament reading (on Sundays and solemnities), and the Gospel — pulled from the USCCB. Tap the Mass tile and the readings for today are right there, with the proper liturgical date, the feast or memorial if applicable, and the option to scroll to upcoming days. It is the simplest possible implementation of "what is the Church reading at Mass this morning," and that simplicity is its strength.

Sitting one tile over is the full Catechism of the Catholic Church. All 2,865 paragraphs, the four pillars (Profession of Faith, Celebration of the Christian Mystery, Life in Christ, Christian Prayer), the prologue, the index — the whole document, in-app, searchable, and free. For RCIA candidates working through the faith, for parents fielding a kid's question at dinner, for anyone wanting to look up what the Church actually teaches on a given topic, the in-pocket Catechism is genuinely useful. It is not as fast as a dedicated reference site, but it is faster than digging out the physical book — and unlike a website, it works in airplane mode once the text is cached.

Multi-language Rosary and prayers: the global Catholic toolkit

Laudate's prayer section is where its breadth shows. The major Catholic prayers — the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed, Memorare, Hail Holy Queen, Angelus, and a long tail of devotionals — are available in Latin alongside English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and additional languages. Tap a prayer, tap a language, and the full text appears. For Catholics who travel, for parishes that pray in more than one language, for anyone learning the Latin tradition, this is genuinely hard to find anywhere else in one app at no cost.

The Rosary itself is built out as a full audio experience: choose Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, or Luminous mysteries, press play, and a recorded voice prays through all five decades with you. The Stations of the Cross, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, the Seven Sorrows, and other devotionals are wired the same way — audio plus text, no payment, no signup. It is not the produced-celebrity-narrator feel of Hallow, but it works in a hospital waiting room, on a walk, or in adoration when you want a Rosary partner and don't want to make a meditation product out of it.

Pricing

Where Laudate falls behind

No produced audio experience. Laudate's Rosary and Chaplet audio are functional recordings, not the cinematic, music-bedded, celebrity-narrated experience Hallow has built its brand on. If "pray with Jonathan Roumie" is the thing that gets you to actually open the app, Laudate will feel flat by comparison.

Dated interface. The home screen is a tile grid. The typography is plain. There is no dark mode in some sections. There is no swipe-driven onboarding, no daily streak, no friend feed. For users who expect a 2026-grade app design, Laudate looks and feels like the early-2010s utility it is. Many users like that — it gets out of the way — but it is worth knowing going in.

No personalization or community layer. There are no reading plans, no journal, no shared prayer lists with friends, no parish features. You open the app, pray what you need, close it. That is by design, but it means Laudate does not build the daily engagement loop that newer apps lean on.

Occasional feed hiccups. Because the Hours and the Mass readings are pulled from upstream sources, on rare occasions a feast-day override or a calendar variation arrives a day late. Most days everything is correct; on a complicated solemnity, double-check against your parish bulletin or the USCCB site.

Ads — small, but present. The banner placements are a fair price for what you get, but they are real. A few users will prefer an ad-free paid app over a free ad-supported one. That is a legitimate preference.

Laudate vs. iBreviary vs. Hallow

Different strengths. Laudate is the broadest free Catholic app. iBreviary is the cleanest free implementation of the Hours and the Missal specifically. Hallow is the most polished paid prayer-experience app on the market. None of the three is strictly better than the others — they answer different questions.

Laudate is better if you want one app that does almost everything a practicing Catholic touches in a week — the Hours, the Mass readings, the Catechism, the Rosary, the Stations, the Chaplet, multilingual prayers, the saints, several Bible translations including the Douay-Rheims — for zero dollars. The interface is dated and the audio is plain, but the coverage is unmatched at the price.

iBreviary is better if you primarily want the Liturgy of the Hours and the Roman Missal, you care about clean typography in the Hours specifically, and you want Latin alongside English text in the same view. It is also free, with no ads, and it is the app many priests and seminarians prefer for the Office. It is narrower than Laudate by design.

Hallow is better if you want celebrity-narrated audio prayer, guided meditations, sleep stories, music-bedded Rosaries, and a designed daily experience — and you are willing to pay around $70 per year for it. Hallow does not replace Laudate's reference depth (the Catechism, the saints, the multilingual prayers), but it produces the daily prayer experience itself at a level no free app can match.

A common stack among Catholic users is to install Laudate as the everyday utility, add iBreviary if they pray the Hours seriously, and add Hallow if they want produced audio prayer. None of them conflict — they answer different needs.

Alternatives to Laudate