Ethiopian Bible

Review by eFreeware

Ethiopian Bible is a free Android app from the developer GeezApps, filed under Books & Reference, that gathers the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo scriptures into one place. The numbers behind it are modest but steady: over 100,000 installs and a 4.6 average across 736 ratings, with a release date of February 14, 2026 and an update in mid-September of the same year.

The reason to consider it is simple. Where most Bible apps stop at the 66 books familiar to Western churches, this one carries the full 81-book Amharic canon, adds English and Tigrinya editions alongside it, and lets you read two languages at once. For anyone who wants the Ethiopian canon rather than a general-purpose study Bible, that combination is the whole point.

It is worth saying early that this is a devotional and reference tool, not a commentary or a course. It gives you the text, the calendar and the reading aids that surround it, and leaves interpretation to you.

The canon that sets this app apart

The headline feature is the canon itself. The Amharic edition has 81 books: 27 in the New Testament and 54 in the Old. The English King James Version and the Tigrinya edition each carry 66 books. Nineteen Ethiopian deuterocanonical writings sit in a separate Ethiopian Canon tab, and the list is unusual enough to be the draw: 1 Enoch, Jubilees, 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, 4 Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, 1, 2 and 3 Meqabyan, the Book of Admonition, Esther with Additions, Bel and the Dragon, the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151.

Three of those, the Meqabyan books, belong to the Ethiopian tradition alone, and several others survive in few other canons. If you have read about the Ethiopian church's wider scripture and wanted to look at the texts themselves, this is the practical way to do it on a phone.

Access to those nineteen works is gated. Each one opens for 14 days after you watch a short ad, which the developer presents as the way the app stays free for everyone. That is a fair trade for a free title, though it does mean the deuterocanonical material is something you revisit rather than own outright.

The presentation gets attention too. Ge'ez script is rendered with Noto Sans fonts, and every book has its own symbolic cover art, which gives the library a sense of order rather than a wall of identical rows.

Reading two languages side by side

Parallel reading is the second thing that stands out. You can place any two of the available languages next to each other and move between them while reading, and the developer says this works across all 66 standard books. For an Amharic speaker working through the English text, or a Tigrinya reader comparing against the KJV, that removes the need to juggle two apps or two printed volumes.

I would expect this to be the feature that keeps people coming back. Comparing translations verse by verse is slow work when you are flipping between books, and having both columns on one screen changes the rhythm of it entirely.

The rest of the reading environment is conventional but complete: dark, light and automatic time-based themes, adjustable font size, chapter navigation, and a resume point so you pick up where you stopped. None of it is novel, and all of it matters once you are reading for twenty minutes at a stretch.

Study tools for regular reading

Beyond the text, the app carries a set of study aids. Full-text search runs across every book and language, so a word or phrase can be traced through the whole library rather than one edition at a time. You can highlight verses in seven colors plus a custom one, attach personal notes to a verse or a whole chapter, and bookmark passages with titles of your own.

Progress tracking works book by book, and the app adds milestones and reading achievements on top. There is a daily verse notification and a weekly summary of what you have read, both of which suit a habit you are trying to build rather than a single long session.

Sharing is built in as well, with verses going out through WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, SMS, email and other services. For anyone who sends a passage to family or a study group, that is a small convenience that adds up.

Calendar, fasting and reading plans

The app leans into its tradition rather than treating it as background. It displays the Ethiopian Ge'ez calendar with the daily date, and it tracks the feast days and saints' commemorations of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Fasts such as Abiy Som, Filseta, Lent and the Wednesday and Friday fasts can be tracked.

For a reader who follows that calendar closely, having the dates and the fasts in the same place as the text is the difference between an app that fits the practice and one that only supplies reading material.

Three structured plans are included: the Bible in one year, the New Testament in 90 days, and a daily Psalms plan. They give the app a spine for people who find an open library intimidating, and the progress tracking described above feeds directly into them.

What it asks of you

The app is free to download and carries advertising. In-app purchases are offered as well. Opening each of the nineteen deuterocanonical books costs one ad, which lasts 14 days.

Requirements are light. After the initial download the app works without an internet connection, and no account or registration is needed, so nothing stands between installing it and reading. That matters for anyone who reads on a commute, on a flight or anywhere the signal is unreliable.

The trade-off is the canon split. The 81-book count applies to the Amharic edition; English and Tigrinya readers get 66 books, with the deuterocanonical texts living in their own tab rather than folded into the main sequence. If you read primarily in English or Tigrinya, you are working with the standard canon plus a separate section, not 81 books in your chosen language.

Getting the most from it

My advice would be to start with one of the three reading plans rather than browsing the library. The one-year plan, the 90-day New Testament plan and the daily Psalms plan each give you a defined next step, and the progress and milestone features are built to reward that kind of steady use.

If you read in more than one language, set up parallel reading before anything else. Choosing your two columns early means your highlights and notes accumulate in a view you will actually keep returning to, rather than being scattered across separate reading sessions.

Treat the Ethiopian Canon tab as a project of its own. Nineteen texts, each opened for 14 days at a time, is a lot to absorb, and the unusual ones among them, the Meqabyan books especially, reward being read slowly rather than sampled. The search, highlighting and note tools work on those texts too, so a first pass with notes will serve you better than a quick skim.

Finally, the fasting tracker and the calendar are worth setting up even if you mainly want the text. They are the parts that tie the app to the church year, and ignoring them leaves half of what the developer built unused.

A study Bible for the Ethiopian canon

Ethiopian Bible covers a specific need very well. The full Amharic canon, English and Tigrinya editions, side-by-side reading, the Ge'ez calendar and the fasting tracker together make it a serious tool for Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox readers, for students of theology, and for anyone who has wanted to read the wider Ethiopian scripture without hunting down separate volumes.

The limits are the ones the developer states. The nineteen deuterocanonical books are opened by watching an ad every 14 days, and in-app purchases exist. The 81-book canon is the Amharic one; the English and Tigrinya editions carry 66 books with the extra texts in their own tab.

For Amharic and Tigrinya learners, the parallel view alone justifies a look. For readers who want a general-purpose study Bible with commentary and cross-references, this is a narrower instrument. But for the canon it is built around, and for the calendar and fasting features that come with it, it is a well-judged free app, and the 4.6 average from 736 ratings suggests readers agree.

What's new in version 2.6.2

Minor fix.