Gita Scroller

Inspiration

The Bhagavad Gita is a conversation on a battlefield: a warrior loses his nerve and his friend Krishna talks him through it. It is 700 verses long and read all over the world, but most people only know a line or two. We wanted it to fit into five minutes on a phone, with the Sanskrit kept first rather than hidden.

What it does

Gita Scroller turns the Gita into a short daily feed. Each swipe is one verse: the original Sanskrit in Devanagari, its transliteration, and plain English you can read on the bus, with a "Go deeper" note on the key Sanskrit words, the story so far and related verses.

• Verses of the day: free for everyone.
• Reading plans: from the Big Questions to the whole Gita in 18 days, one day unlocking after the last.
• Library: all 18 chapters and 700 verses, one verse per swipe.
• Common Ground: a free daily page showing what the Hindu, Jewish, Sikh, Greek and Stoic texts say about the same theme, side by side.
• No account, no ads, no tracking. Works offline.

Design

An ancient text built for the phone. The Sanskrit is set in a proper Devanagari typeface (Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit) above the English, with transliteration in between. Each reading opens on a cover card, a progress bar shows how far through the day's verses you are, and a calm teal palette carries through light and dark mode. The design keeps the original script first and makes a 2,000-year-old conversation feel like something you can read in five minutes.

How we built it

Expo and React Native with Expo Router, RevenueCat for the Plus subscription, and EAS Update so new readings and features reach phones without a new build. The Library book is served as static JSON from Cloudflare Pages and cached on the phone. The English is our own, checked in a content review.

Peace Prize

Talmud Scroller, Gita Scroller and Scroll the Gurbani share one free Common Ground page. Each day it takes one theme (kindness, forgiveness, the stranger, anger, honesty, humility, contentment) and shows what the Jewish, Hindu and Sikh texts say about it side by side, each in its own script and words, with the source, alongside ancient Greek, Norse and Stoic writing. A Jewish reader of the Talmud app, a Hindu reader of the Gita app and a Sikh reader of the Gurbani app meet the same page on the same day, so each learns from the others' tradition in its own words rather than second-hand. Every passage is quoted from the text itself, never paraphrased into agreement, each links back to where it comes from, and the page is never behind a paywall.

What's next

More plans, audio of the Sanskrit, and Android.

For judges

Plus has a 7-day free trial, so you can open everything without paying.

Built With

• cloudflare
• expo.io
• react-native
• revenuecat
• typescript