Every story in this app is a retelling. The events, the names and the places come from Scripture; the words a child hears are written for a child. Each story shows the book and chapter it comes from, so you can always read the original for yourself.
They are adapted from children's Bibles that are in the public domain — principally Jesse Lyman Hurlbut's Story of the Bible (1904) and Henry A. Sherman and Charles Foster Kent's The Children's Bible (1922) — and modernised so that the language is one a child today understands.
Every story is then checked against the Bible itself. For the Old Testament that is the Septuagint, in Sir Lancelot Brenton's English translation (1851), which is in the public domain. For the New Testament it is the New King James Version (1982); the NKJV is a copyrighted translation, so it is used only for checking — no story quotes it.
Books are named as the Septuagint names them, with the more familiar name alongside where the two differ — so 1 Kingdoms 17, rather than only 1 Samuel 17.
The modernising is done once, before the app ships, and every story is then read and approved by a person before it can appear. Nothing is written or changed while you are reading it. If a story is edited afterwards, its approval is automatically void until someone reads it again.
Where a story rests on Holy Tradition rather than on Scripture, the card says so plainly. It is never presented as though it were a book of the Bible.
The pictures are made with the help of a computer, in the visual language of the Byzantine tradition — gold ground, flat perspective, the old palette of ochre, deep red and lapis.
They are not icons, and we do not call them icons. An icon is written by a trained iconographer according to the canons of the Church and blessed for veneration. These are illustrations made in that tradition's style, for a storybook. God the Father is never depicted, following the Great Moscow Synod of 1666–67.
Where a story has a recorded reading, it was made once with a synthetic voice and stored, so it plays straight away and works without a signal. If a story has no recording yet, your own device reads it aloud instead.