Prayer Button
iOS App
Website

What it does

We created a product for telling a prayer buddy that we're praying, by pressing a button.

How it work

This is an AWS IoT Button. When I press the button it connects over wifi, and tells my prayer buddy that I'm praying, via an app on their phone.

How we built it

Swift v3 iOS iPhone app, and the AWS Button talks to the AWS IoT service, which triggers an AWS Lambda, which talks to the Go backend hosted on Pivotal Web Services (PaaS), and using a AWS SimpleDB database.

What's next

We'd like to enable church communities to use this with prayer buddies so all they need to do is hand out pairs of devices. We want it to be possible to use this to do anonymous prayer buddies too. We have started looking into buttons that will work on cellular networks and vibrate when the buddy prays. And we'd like to expand the app so you could look at your prayer history, and we'd like to add incentives to bring you break to praying when life gets on-top of you.

Why

While smartphones have increased the connection we have with each other through social apps, and made it easier for us to carry a Bible with us everywhere. They can get in the way of quality time with God.

As an example: Sometimes I'll think "Oh I should check-in with my buddy and pray for them" and I get my phone out to shoot them a message and then get distracted by an Facebook notification.

We wanted to tell our prayer buddies that we're praying, without needing to interact with our phones.