The Universalis app for Android has been around for a few years now, and many thousands of people are using it. There have recently been some changes and there will be more. This posting gives you an idea of what is going on.
1. Subscriptions
The Android app costs £9.99, or the equivalent in your currency, and once you have paid this, you never need to pay again.
Some people have told us that this is a big lump of money to be paying all at once and they would prefer to pay monthly. So now you have that option. If you get the free Catholic Calendar app, which gives you a month’s worth of free Universalis content (all the Liturgy of the Hours and Mass pages), then at the end of the month it will offer you the chance to start a monthly subscription. This costs $0.99 in the USA and commensurate amounts elsewhere: in the UK it is between £0.75 and £0.89.
Full details are here.
Obviously it’s cheaper in the long run to buy the Universalis app and get rid of Catholic Calendar – but at least you now have the choice.
2. Improved display
Hitherto, the Android app has displayed its pages to you by creating a temporary web page and asking Android to display that page. This had many disadvantages. For instance, if you were half way through a page and turned your device sideways, there was no reliable way for the rotated display to be scrolled to the right place. Either it would bounce up to the top of the whole page, pause a moment, and then bounce back to where you were reading, or it would go up to the top of the page and stay there. This was a serious defect in the design of Android web views and it was impossible for us to do anything about it.
The most serious problem with using web pages was that it was impossible for us to move forward and make the improvements we wanted to make – for example, offering a page-turning display mode of the kind that iOS has. (Some people love scrolling and can’t stand page-turning; others love page-turning and can’t stand scrolling; so it is good to have a choice).
So now we have done the necessary programming, and Universalis is displaying its pages directly on your screen instead of via a pseudo-web view. Once this has all settled down, we will be able to move forward and give you more features and more readable displays.
Any problems?
If you have trouble with the the new display mode, you can turn it off. Open the Settings screen, and you’ll see a switch marked “Advanced Display Mode” at the bottom. But do please let us know. If you don’t tell us what you don’t like, we will never be able to improve things for you. Here is how to contact us.