For those just looking for basic standworks Scriptures with Topical Guide and Bible Dictionary with Hymns then the two free apps
The Scriptures, LDS Hymns and one paid app LDS Study Aid 2010 $1 should suffice.

If, however, you want tons of church manuals, highlighting capability, landscape reading, auto scrolling, bookmarks, history, etc. then perhaps you'd be better off spending $15 on either
LDS Scriptures (Standworks LLC) also in Spanish or
LDS Scriptures App (readmyscriptures) also in Spanish

Here is my comprehensive review of the two best LDS Scripture apps for the iPhone with additional LDS iphone apps below.

Dec 3, 2009 I've made a blog post comparing the lastest LDS Scripture app versions and delcaring a winner to be LDS Scriptures by Standard Works. In a nutshell way better search engine and actually highlights scriptures searched for and viewed. For those who have LDS Scriptures you can get Mormonads and 2009 Gospel Art Library Kit.

LDS Church recently released (October 2009) a LDS Gospel Art Book which is $3.50 or $1.50 in bulk. I made a nice iphone bundle with scripture links to each of the 137 images. Handy for quick lookup within the LDS Scriptures app $15 by Standard Works. Just create a free account within the app and then in your iphone LDS Scriptures app or on the www.ldsscripturesapp.com app search for “gospel art” and “mormonads” and subscribe to both and hit refresh and voila. You can also get all past and current issues of Ensign, Liahona, New Era and Friend.

Mormonads made an iphone bundle too. Back in summer of 2008 the LDS.org organized the New Era Mormonads into categories. Still you can’t look up the scripture references as you have to drill down to the past issues go to the year, then the month and finally find the mormonad link. So after 30 hours or so later that’s what I did and you can have all the links on your iphone. Mormonads go back to 1971 so it’s interesting viewing some of them. All mormonads will be full screen in portrait mode and just tap on scripture reference to view the link within LDS Scriptures app. No need to zoom either as each Mormonad has the text of the message.

The Scriptures King James Bible, D&C, Pearl of Great Price and Book of Mormon, Topical Guide and Bible Dictionary. Development of this free app has stopped (March 2009) due to The LDS Church commencing work on an official LDS Scriptures app. When that'll be completed is anyone's guess.

Quickly locate scripture by navigating by scrolling to which set of scriptures / book / chapter / verse. Another alternative is to use the Scripture Navigator which works quite well. If you pull up the navigator while within a chapter it'll display the verses within the chapter for quick scroll navigation. Chaption captions are included as well as footnotes with links. You can hyperlink as many times as you wish and return to original location just by pressing Done button.

Settings for The Scriptures can be accessed via the Settings iPhone app and include
Font Size: Slightly Smaller, Default Size, Slightly Bigger, Large Print
Font Style: Serif or Sans-Serif
Alignment: Justified or Left Aligned
Night Viewing Mode ON / OFF (background black / white text).
Remember Positiion ON / OFF resumes position in scriptures when resuming app.

LDS Hymns or Himnos SUD (Spanish) contains both lyrics and music. Each hymn is a pdf and can navigate to hymns by number or categories, Hymn titles are also searchable. Tap title bar to quickly shoot to top of hymn after each verse.

Text-only included (music copyrighted): 12, 15, 54, 62, 82, 124, 143, 284
Music-only included (text copyrighted): 299, 323, 324
Hymn entirely omitted (music and text copyrighted): 86, 219, 296

Hymns is the LDS hymns lyrics only (text) without musical notes minus about ten or so copyrighted hymns. Organized by categories or hymn numbers and can resize text for those who can't quite see the LDS Hymns PDF one.

LDS Study Aid 2010 $1 has PDF with page numbers of Gospel Principles the current Priesthood / Relief Society manual. Also the Old Testament Sunday School Study Guide PDF with page numbers for those not opting for one of the $15 LDS Scripture apps this might be a nice option for you I do like how you can double tap in landscape to fill width of screen. On next page just double tap twice once to zoom out and again to fill width.

My main suggestions for author of LDS Scriptures App (readmyscriptures) is to add highlight hyperlinked reference and add Justifiy Alignment option.

July 2009 LDS Scriptures added way to backup data and publish your own content in many formats. They also are distributing Ensign and New Era starting this month which downloads it to your device so you can get it monthly with all links hyperlinked within the app itself. Just create a free account from within LDS Scriptures app then use your browser on your computer to login at ldsscripturesapps.com and subscribe.

Screenshot comparisons. Shown on left is LDS Scriptures $15 and right is LDS Scriptures App $15.

Night viewing mode. Orange is a tad soft for links but gets the job done.

Settings Show Clock option disables top bar for tad more room. Books in Grid for LDS Scriptures and default chapter mode scrolling.
Also chapter summaries for Scriptures.

Shows three line Chapter Summaries in LDS Scriptures App application.

Showing optional Books by Grid rather than scroll feature in LDS Scriptures. This is disabled by default.

Footnotes are obviously identical.

Footnotes linked are automatically highlighted when clicked on in LDS Scriptures. This feature should be added to LS Scriptures App.

Verse Navigation grid selection and verse slider (tap right side of screen within a chapter) in LDS Scriptures.
Verse Navigation in LDS Scriptures App by tapping 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 to locate scripture.

Landscape hyperlinking is disabled in LDS Scriptures as it is in the free The Scriptures app. You can use it but may encounter oddities doing so with LDS Scriptures App. Reason it was disabled is due to an API bug in 2.x.x iPhone OS firmware. This should be rectified in the upcoming 3.0 firmware. December 2009 yep hyperlinking still disabled in landscape mode.

LDS Scriptures has Auto Scroll by tilting (can reverse direction in options if you wish). Also if your laying down in bed it might be better to use the play button and use the slider to control speed of text scrolling. Buy US Historical Documents $1 to test out this feature if you wish. Font selection and 140 colors for Page or Text for LDS Scriptures.

First showing help for Advanced searching capabilities of LDS Scriptures. If this is intimidating to you no need to use it if you don't wish to just use the three default options of All Words, Phrase, or Any Words. But having these Wildcard Searches, Fuzzy Searches, Proximity Searches, and Boolean Operators can really help you narrow down precisely what your looking for and also eliminate parts you are not specifically looking for.

Let's search for forsake their sins (setting to All Words in LDS Scriptures). 15 results found in LDS Scriptures and 20 results found in LDS Scriptures App.

DC 58 chapter summary not shown in LDS Scriptures App "...To repent, men must confess and forsake their sins; 44-58,..." . So evidently doesn't search Chapter summaries.
LDS Scriptures doesn't show Lesson 36 "The Nephites forsake their sins and live righteously." since that content isn't available. Not sure which lesson book it is though. Will detail content comparisons later. For now let's move on.
December 2009 both pretty much now have all church content so this is now irrelevant as both would return similar results.

Now let's navigate to Chapter 5: Repentance. Notice how each search result is display the one line reference in LDS Scriptures.

LDS Scriptures highlights and shows you the point in the lesson exactly where the forsake their sins (all words remember) is used. LDS Scriptures App it only takes you to the top of the lesson Repentance and you'd have to manually eye search where in the lesson is it which is virtually impossible to do. You'd have to scroll to the bottom of page 75 and currently your on page 70.

Another key feature of LDS Scriptures is your search results or within bookmarks you can quickly navigate between them using the up / down arrrow keys next to the Home Button.

Highlighting in LDS Scriptures is pretty straight forward just select your color options and whether underlined, bold or italic. Tap on a word then tap on 2nd word and done. You can use the eraser to tap on word and tap again to select range to erase. Other thing for me is when you choose a background highlight color like yellow (see 5th screenshot) there is white space between each word. (Edit Dec 2009 now no more white space when highlighting).

Highlighting in LDS Scriptures App is really only a bookmarking a scripture verse or paragraph and highlighting it in yellow. Not sure if I'd really call that a true highlighting feature in my opinion. Edit - Dec 2009 now has highlighting of a range so it's true highlighting.

LDS Scriptures showing available content in Library, Creating Bookmarks, Notes, References and showing note icon (star) and clicking on star reveals note inline.

LDS Scriptures App showing available content, hymns and a hymn and a Note.

Mormon Channel LDS Radio $free is an official app from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which contains streaming audio via Wi-Fi or via 3G/Edge which can be toggled on/off in settings. Radio station of various content. General Conference audio sessions from 2003 to present. Ensign, Friend, New Era audio articles. All magazine content from 2004 to present. Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctorine and Covents, and Pearl of Great Price audio. I have downloaded all scripture audio and it's nearly 2GB of data. So streaming it over wifi can save precious space. Although you can't play this audio in the background like you can with mp3s so that's the only downside along with having to have an internet connection.

LDS News $2 is a basic RSS news reader with links to tons of LDS news sites. The Gems can be read offline as they're cached locally. Remembers which articles you haven't read currently. Ability to email links to articles within the app for those with iphone OS 3.0 and above. This is better than the other LDS news app as I have that one too.

Scripture Challenge $1 generates reading chart based on the time you wish to read Book of Mormon for instance. Breaks them up into each day with a page number. Tells you which page number you need to maintain your scripture reading goal. Old Testament and New Testament has pages for English only. Book of Mormon, D&C, and Pearl of Great Price have page totals in 28 languages.

iWard $4 allows you to carry your Ward directory contact info on your iPhone. First you need an lds.org account which can be obtained by having your Ward Clerk print out a membership record for you. Setup section in iWard input your lds.org account username and password. Enter your area code if you wish and optionally your email address if you want AviKey to contact you. I opted out of that myself. Update Directory synchs all contact information to your iPhone. iWard it took 15 seconds and with iStake it took 60 seconds.

Current options available for viewing Ward / Stake Directory on your iPhone include:



A) mobile Safari that would be painfully slow.
B) print the Ward Directory to a PDF and use Annotator $5 appstore app to search within your PDF. You can click on phone number to add to contacts but name, address and everything else would have to be input manually. See two screenshots above.
C) export .csv (comma serparated value to import into a spreadsheet and use file transfer app.
D) export .vcf (virtual card file) and import those into your contacts.

For options A,B,C or D for the masses those are not really pratical solutions thus iWard and iStake to your rescue.

Shows various organizations of your ward with the leaders and counselors of each. Not shown in screenshot but just below Sunday School is Ward Mission, Activities, Other and Setup. Showing Bishopric and Relief Society Leaders. Click on any name for contact information.

You can search your Ward Directory providing first and last name matches or partial. Also quickly navigate by using ABC vertical bar.

Contact information for each person allows you to click on
- Call to dial if you have an iPhone. Obviously won't work with an ipod touch.
- Map opens up google maps with street view, directions to, etc.
- Send lets you send an email to the contact.
Copy to Contacts works wonderfully and copies entire contact information to your Contacts app. This feature alone is one of the main benefits of iWard and iStake.

iStake $8 allows you to carry your entire Stake directory contact info on your iPhone. Virtually identical to iWard but has Stake Directory with all wards in your Stake. Only try to point out additional features of iStake. Stake Leadership and each invidiual Wards Auxilliaries are available.

You can search the entire stake directory or only search within a particular ward. Showing Stake Leadership and Stake Presidency.

You can view all auxillaries in one paticular ward within your stake just like in iWard, but iWard is only your ward. Also you can view Stake Auxilliaries for example Elders Quorum or Relief Society(see screenshots) and show them in a scrollable list which you can view which is quite handy.

Conclusion is iWard and IStake are excellent and offer a convenient interface to quickly access LDS Ward and Stake Directory information on your iPhone. Those contacts can be synched with iTunes to your gmail or yahoo email contacts. If you plan on getting iStake don't buy iWard which should go without saying, but saying it just in case. For those with leadership postion and who can export MLS data you can try free Ward Tools.

Updated February 2010

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