When it’s faith time, are all digital devices the same?

About ten years ago I wrote how digital technologies are (or should?) deeply influence the religious sphere, in Catholicism or any other religion. In that post, I basically made two main points:

1. Lots of stuff is surely “welcome and really laudable, [but is] nothing but extensions to a new media of stuff that was already happening before computers”.
2. But one field of Catholic investigation that may bring to interesting results is the one about the nature of digital technologies: are they purely neutral tools? Can Catholics just adopt the most popular software tools and use them as most other people do, without thinking to how they really work, or should they pay more attention?"

Today is the 9th anniversary of big media coverage for an iPhone app that, nine years later, remains a very good example of both points.

“Confession: A Roman Catholic App”

On February 15th, 2011, “Confession” by Little iApps was rising to the top of Apple’s “Lifestyle” application charts, with “official approval from a Catholic Bishop [and] even drawing the interest of those outside of the Catholic Church”, exactly because of the first point above: it was, and is, one more convenient way to do exactly what every Catholic should be regularly doing anyway (personal preparation for Confession), and nothing more.

At the same time, by being available only for iOS, “Confession” also is one of the cases in which Catholics should, see above, evaluate if it they should “just adopt the most popular software tools and use them as most other people do”, without paying more attention. I could write thousands of words on this, but the one-sentence version of what I mean is:

After the call to more environmental sensibility of Laudato Si, should a platform that cares so little about right to repair than others are leaving it for that reason only be the first choice for Catholics?