Praylist - Why I Built This App for Recording Your Prayers

There are times when something comes to mind that I want to pray about. Something I hope will happen, something I want to change about myself, or something I want to ask for on behalf of someone I love.

But prayers that remain only in our thoughts can easily get lost in the busyness of everyday life. We may pray earnestly for something for a few days, only to forget about it at some point. After enough time passes, we may not even clearly remember what we were praying for in the first place.

Praylist is an app that helps you record the Prays you carry in your heart by category and return to them at a consistent time each day to pray. The name combines pray and bucket list. Rather than simply building an endless list, I wanted to create an experience that helps people write down what truly matters to them and return to it consistently.

The Story That Began With Ten Prayer Requests

This story began about ten years ago.

At the time, I had been reading books and learning about the importance of writing things down. I was fascinated by the idea that when we put our thoughts into words, vague feelings become concrete sentences, and even years later, we can return to who we were at that moment.

So I wrote down ten prayer requests.

I called them prayer requests, but to be completely honest, they were simply ten things I desperately wanted at the time. I prayed over those ten things every day.

And as time passed, all ten of the things I had written down came true.

They did not happen in the order I expected, nor in the ways I imagined. In fact, one by one, they became reality in ways I could not have imagined at the time.

This is not a claim that every prayer will always be answered exactly the way we want. It is simply the experience of one person.

But through that experience, I learned something very clearly.

Because I had written those prayers down, I could remember what I had prayed for. And as time passed, I could look back and see how those prayers had unfolded.

This is simply one experience from my own life.

But one thing was clear. Because I had recorded those prayers, I could remember what I had been praying about and later look back on how those prayers had continued to unfold over time.

I did not want to keep that experience only to myself.

I began building Praylist because I wanted other people to be able to write down what they carry in their hearts, pray consistently, and look back on their own journey over time.

Why Move Prayer From Your Mind Into a Record?

Often, the problem is not that we do not want to pray.

The problem may simply be that we do not have a place that helps us remember and return to our prayers.

A prayer that exists only in your mind can easily disappear. Something that feels deeply important today can be pushed aside by tomorrow's schedule, and a few days later, another worry may take its place.

Eventually, the prayer stops.

And when we cannot see an answer, we may begin to wonder whether our prayers are reaching anywhere at all, or conclude that nothing happens when we pray.

But when there is a record, we have somewhere to return to.

We can look back at what we hoped for, why it mattered so much at the time, and what has changed since then. Even when the answer looks different from what we expected, recording our prayers gives us a chance to look back on the journey more slowly and carefully.

Praylist is not an app that provides answers about faith.

It does not pray for you automatically, and it does not guarantee results.

It simply creates a place where the Prays that once existed only in your heart do not disappear, and helps you return to them every day.

Bringing Pray and Bucket List Together

In Praylist, each prayer request is called a Pray.

You can organize and record them by category: the kind of person you want to become, things you want to experience, places you want to visit, or meaningful moments you want to share with someone.

You can use the categories already provided or create your own categories that better fit your life.

The Prays you record appear again in Today's Prayer.

Rather than scrolling through a long list all at once, the experience is designed so that you can pause with one Pray, spend a moment praying about it, and then move on to the next.

You can receive a daily reminder at the time you choose, and every day you pray is recorded in your Footprints calendar. When a Pray has been answered, you can also record the date and look back on the time that has passed.

All of these features began with the same question:

How can a written record lead into prayer, and how can today's prayer become part of the record of our lives?

I Let AI Handle the Development, but I Could Not Delegate the Decisions

The implementation of Praylist was fully delegated to Codex, an AI coding agent.

From building the screens and storing data to connecting notifications and running tests, the actual code was written by AI.

That did not mean there was nothing left for me to do.

In fact, I had to describe the direction of the app more clearly than ever.

Who is this app for? What information should it store? What permissions should it request? What should it support, and what should it deliberately avoid? What technologies should it use?

I had to keep making decisions.

In the process of turning a simple idea into an actual product, I realized that the hardest part was not adding more features.

The hardest part was deciding what value the user should receive from the app and removing the choices that distracted from that value.

AI can suggest many different ways to implement something.

But the person building the product still has to decide why a feature should exist, how far it should go, and when to stop even when more could technically be built.

That process of making decisions was one of the biggest things I learned while building Praylist.

Why Is Each Category Limited to Ten Prays?

Each category in Praylist can contain a maximum of ten Prays.

That limit was not part of the original idea.

At first, I thought it would be more natural to allow unlimited Prays because people may have many things they want to pray about.

But when I imagined the list growing endlessly, I began to see another problem.

The more Prays there are, the less time we may spend with each one.

Our attention can become scattered across too many things, and at some point, we may become more focused on collecting Prays than actually praying through them.

So instead of unlimited storage, I chose an experience built around focus.

The limit of ten is not intended to make the app inconvenient.

It is a guideline that encourages you to think once more about what truly matters to you right now and helps you continue returning to the Prays you have already written down.

In fact, I originally considered limiting the entire app to only ten Prays.

Eventually, as a practical compromise, I decided to allow up to ten Prays in each category.

The decision was not based on how many items the technology could store. It was based on which experience felt closer to the purpose of the app.

Start With One Pray Today

Building a habit of prayer does not have to begin with an ambitious plan.

Writing down one Pray that is on your heart and praying about it once today is enough.

If you can open that sentence again tomorrow, and later look back on the path you have taken, the record becomes more than just a list.

I hope Praylist can become an app that supports that kind of small, repeated practice.

Through this app, I hope more people will record their prayers, continue praying day by day, and discover answers and changes within their own lives.

I sincerely hope that every Pray you write down will come true.

Your interest and feedback are a great encouragement as I continue developing Praylist. If you try the app and have thoughts to share or features you would like to see, I would love to hear from you.

What if you started today by writing down the one Pray that matters most to you?

Discover Praylist on the App Store

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This article was originally written in Korean. You can read the original Korean version here:

👉 Read the original article in Korean