Background on the Creation

Rylan Evans of the creator said the following about his creation. “Nearly every week, I gather my family and host a traditional family home evening.  But it takes so long to prepare and make assignments. Unfortunately, our family night was turning into a family fight that starts and ends with a prayer. Especially when it came to who was on the treat! 

In our fast-paced world that we live in, everybody is so busy with teenagers in and out, we don’t have time to prepare a family night. I often thought to myself, there has got to be a better way! So I created a family home evening app.  It is designed to make planning and executing FHE more effective and convenient for members of the church. It keeps kids engaged. You can simply say who is going to be attending, pick your songs, and everything is ready to go. It also brings a whole new form of structure that the traditional family home evening doesn’t do. There’s nothing else like it.

The app takes about five minutes to initially set up. From there, each weekly family night can be planned in one minute. It includes content (links and ideas for songs, lessons, activities and treats) for more than two years of Family Home Evenings without duplication. It’s clean, simple, customizable, includes iMessage stickers, and works on all iPhones and iPads. It’s content is pointed directly to the official website of the LDS church, LDS.org.”

Rylan enrolled in classes at DevMountain to learn how to program iPhone apps. He then spent 6 months from start to finish to create the application. He keeps it free as all the content comes directly from LDS.org and other official church sites. Here is an overview of the application, with a link to download at the bottom.

Product Overview

The mobile application is named, “LDS-Family Home Evening.” Some of the features include the following: Family Members, Task Assignments, Family Home Evening (FHE) Meeting, Screen Share, and iMessage Stickers. The app takes less than 5 minutes to set up. From then on, it takes less than 1 minute to prepare for FHE. Simply pick from a list for each song, scripture, lesson or activity, and you are ready to begin. Seamless for small, large, or mixed families on the go, including “newly weds” or “empty nesters”. Simple enough that Grandparents and kids can use it without explanation. Why every LDS family needs the “LDS-Family Home Evening” App? It puts order in our homes in an effective way: FHE can be easy to prepare, quick to deliver, engage youth through technology, and have a meaningful impact on families by sharing righteous and powerful principles!

Family Members

Users can customize their family with name and photo then flag members as attending or not. Users can allow temporary guest to be a part of family night too.

Task Assignments

Users can pick and enable from 14 different tasks for their FHE. Keep things simple with the OLD traditional FHE tasks that include: prayer, songs, scriptures, lessons, activity and treats. Or stir things up by adding NEW task assignments that include: family rules, bear testimony, spotlight someone, calendar planning, famous quotes, or turn it into a family council. Users can create custom songs, scriptures, lessons. Or users can select from a pre-populated list. The app comes with 100+ for each of the following: songs, scriptures,  lessons,  activities; sorted by either alphabet, category, topic, book, or favorites. All tasks are searchable. All tasks can be either manually or auto-assigned.

Family Home Evening Meeting

Once ready with attending members and enabled tasks, press “Begin” and simply flip through the assignments like a PowerPoint presentation. That’s it. Play and sing-along to songs together, read scriptures without turning pages, watch a video, find instructions to activities, or prepare a treat. You can do all this while never leaving the app, with direct links to everything.

Screen Share

Watch it on your family room TV! The app was designed for beautiful TV display for all to watch and follow along. What makes this all come together is when users do a screen share and mirror their device to the big screen. The app includes suggestions for hardware that users may need to set-up screen share if they do not already have an Apple TV or a Lightning Digital AV Adaptor.

iMessage Stickers

Users can send text messages with cute LDS-themed stickers to family and friends. Stickers are images of traditional LDS principles and ordinances we all know and hold dear: Prayer, Scriptures, Church, Mission, Temple, CTR, etc. When downloading the FREE FHE app, stickers are automatically included and downloaded to the users iMessage library.

 

You can download the application on the App Store here: LDS-Family Home Evening Tools