I want to tell you about something I have been building quietly, and to be honest with you about where it stands.
There is an Ifá Discovery app in development. It is not live yet. It is not on the App Store or on Google Play, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is real, a great deal of work has already gone into it, and I would rather tell you the truth about it now than present you with a finished thing later and hide the years behind it.
What the app will offer
The website can hold a daily entry, and it does. But an app can hold the practice with you through the day, which is a different thing entirely.
The plan is for the daily Odù and Oríkì to travel with you, in your pocket, in the morning before the noise starts. Gentle notifications, so the day does not swallow the practice. A personal journal, private to you, where you can record what you noticed, what repeated, what a verse cracked open. And offline access to the wisdom you have unlocked, so a poor signal on a train or a quiet room with no internet does not stand between you and your own study.
None of this is a replacement for a Babaláwo or an Ìyánífá. It never was. It is a way of keeping the thread in your hand between the times you sit with an elder.
Why it is being built this way
This is a Yorùbá-owned project. I say that plainly because it matters, and because so much of what circulates about this tradition online was assembled by people standing outside it.
The work has not been handed to an agency to interpret, and it is not being run by people who encountered Ifá as a market opportunity. The decisions about what a verse means, what can be shared, what must be left to initiated hands, and how the Òrìṣà are spoken about are being made from inside the tradition, with care, and with the awareness that getting it wrong causes real harm to real people who are trying to find their way home.
That is slower. It is also the only version of this I am willing to put my name on.
Where the work actually stands
Here is the honest account. The app was built out over an extended period. It progressed far enough to reach App Store submission, which is not a small milestone for an independent project. Then it paused.
It paused for the ordinary reasons that pause most independent work. Time, cost, and the fact that one person can only carry so many things at once. Paused is not abandoned. The code exists. The design exists. The knowledge behind it exists. What is missing is the stretch of concentrated work and expense needed to carry it over the line and keep it alive once it is there.
An invitation, not an appeal
So I am asking, and I want to be careful about how I ask.
This is not charity. I am not asking you to rescue anything. I am inviting you to hold a piece of a thing that belongs to all of us. The tradition survived because ordinary people carried it when carrying it cost them something. A contribution toward finishing this app sits in that same lineage of ordinary people keeping something alive, at a much smaller scale and a much smaller cost.
If you are able and you feel moved to, you can contribute below, at whatever amount is genuinely comfortable for you. If you are not able, that is completely fine, and nothing here is closed to you because of it. Reading, sharing, and telling one person who needs this that it exists is also a real contribution.
Either way, when it launches, it will have been built by us. Àṣẹ.
The Ifá Discovery app is planned for both the App Store and Google Play. It is currently in development and not yet available on either. Contributions support the completion of the build and do not purchase access, a licence, or a guaranteed release date.