Eli Schafer

Founder and developer, Hear Him

I am the whole company. I designed Hear Him, wrote every line of its code, chose and edited the 374 journeys inside it, and I write everything on this site. There is no content team and no agency. If something here is wrong, it is my mistake, and you can tell me.

I built it because I kept losing my mornings. I would reach for my phone before I was properly awake, surface forty minutes later, and the thing I actually meant to do first never happened. Every blocker I tried gave me a blank screen and a timer, which is a punishment, not a replacement. So I built the version I wanted: the feeds stay shut until the reading is done, and the reading is short, plain and finishable on a bad day.

The plain English matters as much as the lock. I grew up able to recite verses I could not have explained. Hear Him puts the King James text and a plain-English line side by side on every verse, because most people do not stop reading scripture out of indifference — they stop because they are three verses in and have lost the thread.

What I have built

All of it solo, and all of it still shipping. You can check every item on this list against the app itself.

The Hear Him iPhone app

Written from scratch in Swift and SwiftUI — the reader, the audio Bible, the streak system, the widgets and the paywall. No cross-platform framework, no contractors.

Scripture-gated Screen Time

The part nobody else does: Hear Him uses Apple's Family Controls and Device Activity frameworks to shield your chosen apps until the day's reading is done, with a branded lock screen instead of the system's blank one.

The plain-English verse layer

Every verse in the app carries the King James text and a plain-English line beside it, so a passage you have read ten times without following it finally lands. The same pairing runs through this whole site.

374 guided journeys and 8 study plans

Short, structured studies — scripture, a reflection, a word study and a prayer — written and edited for people who open a Bible and do not know where to start.

The Hear Him Chrome extension

The same idea on the desktop: a verse where the new tab used to be, so the first thing in front of you is not a feed.

This site

Built in Astro and hosted on Firebase. Every guide, comparison, printable and devotional on it was written by hand.

How I write the pages on this site

Comparisons name the thing my own app is worse at. If a page only ever flatters Hear Him it is an advert, and you would be right not to trust it.
Prices and feature claims about other apps are what their own sites and App Store listings say at the time of the last review date on the page. They change; tell me when one is stale.
Anything about phone habits and mental health links out to the people who actually study it, and says plainly where the line is between a habit and something worth talking to a doctor about.
Scripture is quoted from the King James Version, with the plain-English line marked as a paraphrase rather than passed off as translation.

Everything I have written here

18 pieces, last reviewed 8 October 2026. The 374 journeys and the daily verse pages are not listed individually.

Guides

Comparisons

Scripture

Tools

Phone addiction test

Ten questions, a score, the yearly time cost, and a plan sized to the result.

Reviewed 8 October 2026

Printables

Tell me where I am wrong

A correction on a price, a feature, a verse reference or a claim about another app goes straight to me — there is nobody else for it to go to.

Contact support See the app