Life.Church began in January 1996 when Craig and Amy Groeschel started a congregation meeting in a two-car garage in Edmond, Oklahoma, an origin with nothing about it that predicted the church would later reshape a daily habit for hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have never set foot in Oklahoma. The turn toward software began in 2006, when the church launched what it describes as the first fully online church experience, treating a live digital service as a genuine congregation rather than a recording of one.
The bigger product came from solving a narrower problem. In 2007 the team, led by innovation leader Bobby Gruenewald, built a website meant to make daily Bible reading easier to sustain; people visited once, then mostly did not return, and the team concluded the format itself, a website competing with everything else a browser tab can hold, was the obstacle. The following year, timed almost exactly to the opening of Apple's App Store, they released the same idea as a dedicated mobile application instead: YouVersion. The app drew 83,000 downloads in its first three days, a scale the website had never approached, and growth compounded from there rather than plateauing, eventually surpassing one billion installs.
Life.Church has stated it will never place ads or a paywall inside the app despite the revenue either would generate, treating free universal access to scripture as the actual point of the project rather than as a feature attached to some other business model built around it.