Kenya ranks fifth in the world for daily use of YouVersion’s Bible apps. It started 2026 in that spot and has held it all year. Daily use in Kenya is up 36%, YouVersion said on 6th October 2026.
YouVersion makes the Bible App, a free app with 3,800 versions of the Bible in 2,400 languages, plus reading plans and videos. It began in 2007 as a project of Life.Church, a church in Oklahoma in the US, and everything it makes is free because donors pay for it. Besides the main app there’s Bible App Lite, built for phones with little storage and for reading offline, and Bible App for Kids. When we covered YouVersion last November, its apps had just passed one billion installs.
More Kenyans are also committing to read the whole Bible. Bible in a Year is a reading plan inside the app that splits the Bible into a daily portion, so that if you keep up, you finish it in 12 months. The number of people in Kenya committed to finishing one of these plans is up nearly 50% this year.
What the Kenyan numbers leave out
YouVersion hasn’t said how many Kenyans open the app each day, so the 36% can’t be turned into a number of people. It also doesn’t say what the ranking measures, which four countries sit above Kenya, or which months it compared to get the growth figure. The last Kenyan count it gave was installs: 19 million in February, when it opened its Nairobi hub. Installs count devices, so someone who has the app on two phones counts twice. At the time, YouVersion put Kenya’s growth in daily use at 39% year on year.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, daily use of YouVersion’s apps is up 63% this year. Kenya’s standout number in the region is its rank. YouVersion’s own map of 2026 growth puts its 36% behind Zimbabwe at 72% and Nigeria at 37%, and ahead of South Africa at 8%.
The Kenyan release leads with the year’s most searched words in the app: “anxiety”, “hope” and “healing”, with “Psalm 91” the single most searched term. Psalm 91 is the psalm about God as a shelter and protector in danger. These are worldwide searches, though. YouVersion’s global release on the same day carries the same paragraph almost word for word, and YouVersion hasn’t published a search list for Kenya alone. Worldwide, 18.5 million people use its apps every day, up more than 13% on 2025.
What happens in November
The figures came out ahead of Global Bible Month, which runs from 1st to 30th November 2026. Now in its second year, it brings together churches, ministries, Bible societies and publishers. The centre of it is the 30-Day Bible Challenge: read the Bible every day for 30 days in a row, in a printed Bible or an app. Last year, the first, nearly 3 million people signed up worldwide. This year the Challenge adds a feature that tracks your progress and shows you how your friends are getting on.
You sign up at globalbiblemonth.com with your email and choose who you’re joining with from a list. The form says YouVersion may share your name and email with the partner you pick, to support your part in the Challenge.
In Kenya, the partners taking part include the Bible Society of Kenya, ICC Nairobi, Mavuno Church, The Identity Project, ACABA and CLC Kenya. They work with YouVersion’s Nairobi hub, which opened on 23rd February 2026. Led by Joseph Gachira, it brings more African voices into the app through local churches and creators. “People have loved seeing faces they know, hearing voices they trust locally and finding contexts, and even accents, they can relate to,” Gachira said. YouVersion has hubs in the UK, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico too, and plans to open one in Nigeria before the end of the year.
Kenya has held fifth place for nine months while its daily use grew by more than a third, and YouVersion now has a team and a list of local partners in Nairobi to build on that in November. Joining the Challenge is free. The partner you pick at sign-up may get your name and email address, so pick one you’re happy to hear from.
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