Catalysis
A Catholic companion app for Gen Z and college students that combines daily scripture, prayer, community, reels, events, and an AI assistant across web and mobile.
What needed solving
Young Catholics live on their phones, but the apps built for them tend to feel either dated or disconnected from everyday life. Scripture, prayer, community, and events were scattered across several tools.
The product needed to make daily faith feel as natural as opening any other app, with the energy of the platforms its audience already uses.
What made it hard
One product, two targets: a responsive web app and a native mobile app that share a visual system, a light and dark theme, and the same underlying data.
Lumen, the AI assistant, had to answer questions from Scripture and the Catechism with citations, so accuracy and attribution mattered more than conversational flair.
What we built
Catalysis brings daily scripture, a prayer guide with streaks, a community feed with prayer intentions, short-form reels, events, and a liturgical calendar into one place, with Lumen available throughout.
The web app and the mobile app are built from shared tokens and a shared API package, so features and content stay consistent across both.
How it looks and feels
A Gen Z direction: bold display type, bright accent cards, a bento grid of features, and photography of sacred art, balanced by a calm reading mode for scripture.
Every surface was designed in both light and dark mode from the start, with semantic color tokens so no screen hard-codes a theme.
How it works
The web app is built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. The mobile app uses Expo and React Native with Expo Router, sharing packages for the API, design tokens, and Bible text in a pnpm monorepo.
Lumen is powered by the Claude API and runs server-side only, returning answers with structured citations.
Where it landed
A single faith companion that works on the web and on the phone, with daily habits, community, and an AI assistant that cites its sources.
From idea to production, we design and build the whole thing.
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