Синодал, ежедневное чтение для iPhone, iPad, Mac и Apple Watch
The Synodal Bible, a prayer book, the liturgical calendar, and icon recognition from a photo. Everything sits inside the app: 77 books, 250 prayers, 8,235 dictionary entries. On the subway, on a plane, and in church it works exactly as it does at home. The app's content is Russian throughout.
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
The Today screen. Sample day: Friday, July 24, 2026, with the app's own data.
None of this needs an internet connection. The app is the size it is, and after that it downloads nothing.
Plus 455 icon histories and 1,242 prayers to specific icons, in the same bundled database.
The classifier is trained on 372 specific icons and runs through Core ML on the device itself. The photo goes nowhere: recognition never touches the network.
When the model is confident you get a name, a match percentage, the saint's life or the icon's history, and the prayers that belong to it. When it isn't, it says «Возможно, это:» (possibly this) and offers a few likely matches, drawn from all 3,158 in the set. When even that comes up empty, it admits it didn't recognize the icon and asks for another photo.
The percentage next to the name is the model's confidence in that one photo, not a claimed accuracy for the app. Accuracy hasn't been measured on ordinary photos people actually take, and until it is, no accuracy figure belongs on this page.
The camera opens only for recognition, and the processing happens on the device through Core ML. You can save shots to your own Photos library too; that's a separate setting.
First the classifier, over the 372 icons it was trained on. If it isn't confident enough, a similarity search across all 3,158 takes over, and the answer becomes a suggestion instead of a statement.
2,111 lives, 455 icon histories, and 1,242 prayers ship with the app and work offline. A troparion (the short hymn for a saint or a feast) shows its tone, the melody it's sung to; some prayers carry a modern Russian rendering.
Тексты: azbyka.ru · Каталог икон: pravicon.com
All 77 books ship inside the app. No chapter is fetched over the network, so reading on a plane works the same as reading at home. The app remembers where you stopped and keeps the neighboring chapters ready, so paging across a chapter boundary doesn't stall.
Tap a word you don't know and the dictionary opens: 6,826 entries from Erik Nyström's Biblical Dictionary (1874) and 1,409 from the Church Slavonic Dictionary of Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko (1900). An index of 129,993 word forms from OpenCorpora sits alongside them, so a word gets found in any form, not just the one it's listed under.
Version 1.5 adds search: type a word, a phrase, or a reference like «Ин 3:16» and the app opens the verse. It searches by word stems, so «милосердие» (mercy) is found in any form, and a topical index of 104 entries leads to passages where the word itself never appears: the prodigal son points to Luke 15. The 37,086-verse index ships inside the app; search never touches the network. The Psalter is now marked up by kathisma too: 20 kathismas, each with its three «Славы», right in the Synodal text.
Ты приготовил предо мною трапезу в виду врагов моих; умастил голову мою; чаша моя преисполнена.
Tap the underlined word
елеем → елей
елей
Оливковое масло, используемое в религиозных обрядах и жертвоприношениях.
Источник: Библейский словарь
Psalm 22:5 in the Synodal numbering, which is Psalm 23 in most English Bibles. Here «елеем» (oil) stands in the instrumental case. The word-form index resolves it to the entry «елей», so nobody has to guess the dictionary form.
Your place in a book is kept automatically and follows you to your other devices over iCloud, if sync is on.
A short prayer before you start, over the text. It opens when you want it and stays out of the way when you don't.
You can open the dictionary directly instead of from a verse, and search names, places, and Church Slavonic words across the whole database.
Morning and evening prayers, the preparation for Communion, canons, 12 akathists, the kathisma Psalter, and prayers for particular needs: 250 texts, each with a Russian translation. The prayer book nearly doubled in 1.5: akathists, the Church Slavonic Psalter with stress marks, prayers for the day, for family, for the country. And search now understands what you mean: «когда болеет ребёнок» (when a child is sick) or «перед экзаменом» (before an exam) find the right prayer even when those words aren't in any title.
The commemoration list, the помянник, holds two lists of names, for the living and for the departed. This is where the work you'd otherwise do in your head starts. «Спаси, Господи, и помилуй раба Твоего…» needs the accusative, «Упокой, Господи, душу усопшего раба Твоего…» needs the genitive, and the slip of names you hand in at church is always written in the genitive. The app declines the names itself and drops them into the text along with «раба» or «рабу» to match the gender.
Молитва о здравии
Спаси, Господи, и помилуй раба Твоего Георгия, и даруй ему мирные Твои земные и небесные блага.
accusative
О здравии Георгия
genitive
Egor and Yuri are the everyday forms of Georgy.
Three names on a loop. The app takes the declension from its bundled database of church names, and falls back to Russian grammar rules for names it doesn't know.
Your own sequence built from any prayers in the app, in your order, with a “read straight through” button.
A short guide inside the app: use the full baptismal name (Иоанна, not Ивана; Фотинии, not Светланы), no surnames, patronymics, or titles, and no notes for the unbaptized.
The commemoration list, bookmarks, and My Rule sync only through your own private iCloud database. Neither I nor anyone else can reach it.
Reading plans turn intention into habit. Any prayer can become a daily reading: 7, 12, or 40 days, until the end of a fast, or your own span. An akathist is traditionally read 40 days in a row, and the app never splits one across days: it is a single hymn. The Psalter goes at a kathisma a day, a full cycle in 20 days, or one «Слава» at a time, a cycle in 60. The Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete sits on its own dates: Monday through Thursday of the first week of Great Lent.
Progress is shown as a ring. If you forgot to mark a day, the last 14 can be marked after the fact. No more than three plans run at once, because more than three daily readings is not a rule any more, it is a to-do list. Reminders are local; plans sync through your own private iCloud database.
The ring counts days. The daily check can be set from the phone or from the watch.
The date of Easter is computed from the formula, not read out of a table that only covers the next couple of years, so the movable feasts (the ones whose dates follow Easter) still line up a decade from now. How strict the fast is, the tone, and the readings are shown for every day of the month, not only for today.
This is also where the app's only network request lives: azbyka.ru/days, as a fallback for calendar data. The cache is checked first, then the bundled database, and the network is asked only if neither had the answer. The request carries a date and nothing else.
July 2026. The Apostles' Fast runs through July 11, after which Wednesdays and Fridays stay fast days. The selected day is the same one shown on the Today screen above.
Settings have one text size, from 25 to 52 points. The rest of the scale derives from it: headings, section labels, reading references, dictionary captions. You never end up with body text that grew while everything around it stayed small.
A book serif with real Cyrillic, not a system fallback standing in for one. Long passages are easier on the eyes in it.
Screens aren't rebuilt on every switch, and neighboring Bible chapters are prefetched, so paging never waits on a load.
Labels and hints are written throughout the app, including reading rows and the similarity meter in icon recognition. A reading you can't open offline says exactly that.
Your place in a book, the commemoration list, bookmarks, My Rule, and reading plans move between iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Everything lives in your own private CloudKit database, merging is computed on the device, and there's a switch in Settings.
Requires iOS 18, macOS 15, or watchOS 11. On iPad and Mac the layout uses the width it's given instead of stretching a phone screen across it. The watch has its own setup: the New York face and large sizes for reading on the move.
Version 1.5 brings Synodal to the Apple Watch: prayers only, no Bible and no calendar, because the prayer book is what actually fits a small screen. My Rule, bookmarks, and all 250 texts live on the watch itself and work offline; the phone can stay home.
Long texts are cut into short fragments: the Communion sequence runs about 65,000 characters, and scrolling that on a 40 mm screen is not reading. «Далее» (next) swaps the fragment in place, «Содержание» (contents) jumps between prayers. Marking a reading plan done for the day works right from the wrist.
The watch screen is built in HTML, like every mockup on this page.
This isn't a stance or a promise about the future. It's how the app is built right now. You can check it in the source.
There is no sign-up at all. The app doesn't know who you are.
Not a single third-party SDK. The data-collection declaration in PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy is empty, because there is nothing to declare.
azbyka.ru/days, a fallback source for the calendar. Cache first, then the bundled database, then the network. No name, no identifier, and nothing about what you read.
The camera opens only for icon recognition, and the shot is processed on the device. You can save shots to your own Photos library too; that's a separate setting.
Sync writes to your own private CloudKit database: reading position, the commemoration list, bookmarks, My Rule, reading plans. I have no access to it, and sync can be turned off in Settings.
The Apple Watch gets prayers and names straight from the phone, device to device. The watch app makes no network requests at all.
None of these texts are mine. The app collects them, shows them offline, and credits the source in place, not only on this page.
Lives of the saints, icon histories, prayers to particular icons, and the calendar for a given day.
The icon catalog: the names of the icons, their categories, and reference images.
Erik Nyström, 1874. 6,826 entries.
Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko, 1900. 1,409 entries.
129,993 word forms, opencorpora.org, licensed CC BY-SA. They are why the dictionary finds a word in any form.
The app's source code is open. If anything on this page reads like marketing, the code is there to be read in full.
github.com/troegubovco/RussianOrthodoxReaderYes. The Bible, the prayer book, the dictionary, the lives of the saints, and icon recognition all ship inside the app and never touch the network. The app's only network request is azbyka.ru/days, a fallback for calendar data, and it carries a date and nothing else.
No. There are no accounts, no analytics, and no third-party SDKs; the data-collection declaration in PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy is empty. The source code is open, so you can check.
Point the camera at an icon and the app tells you who is in it: the name, the saint's life or the icon's history, and the prayers that belong to it. The classifier is trained on 372 icons and runs through Core ML on the device; the photo goes nowhere. When the model isn't confident, it says so and offers likely matches drawn from all 3,158 icons in the set.
The percentage next to a name is the model's confidence in that one photo, not a claimed accuracy for the app. Accuracy hasn't been measured on ordinary photos people actually take, and until it is, no figure gets published.
The Russian Synodal translation, complete: all 77 books. Tap a word and a dictionary opens: 6,826 entries from Nyström's Biblical Dictionary and 1,409 from Dyachenko's Church Slavonic Dictionary, and a word is found in any grammatical form thanks to an index of 129,993 word forms.
Offline, like everything else. Prayer search understands what you mean: «когда болеет ребёнок» (when a child is sick) finds the right prayer even when those words aren't in any title. Bible search matches word stems and understands references like «Ин 3:16», jumping straight to the verse.
iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the Apple Watch; it requires iOS 18, macOS 15, or watchOS 11. Your reading position, the commemoration list, bookmarks, My Rule, and reading plans follow you between devices through your own private iCloud database, if sync is on.
The whole prayer book, My Rule, and bookmarks. The texts live on the watch itself, so you can read without the phone nearby. There is no Bible and no calendar on the watch: the prayer book is what actually fits a small screen.
Yes, everything in the app is Russian: the texts, the prayers, the calendar, and the interface. The English is just this page.
Yes: github.com/troegubovco/RussianOrthodoxReader. If anything on this page reads like marketing, the code is there to be read in full.
Synodal is available now for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. It requires iOS 18, macOS 15, or watchOS 11. If you want to ask something, suggest something, or point out a mistake in the texts, email me.
Synodal · Синодал