Your church can have its own iPhone and Roku app — under your name, in the official stores, without an Apple Developer account or Roku SDK. Here is why most churches don't, and how it actually works.

Open the home screen on your members' TVs. Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV — chances are most of them are looking at one of those three when they walk into the living room.

Now ask yourself: how does your church show up there?

If the answer is they have to remember our YouTube channel and search for it every time, that's the gap this post is about. There's a category of streaming product your church can have — a branded native app, in the official Roku Channel Store and the Apple App Store, listed under your church's name — that most churches don't even know is available to them. This post is about why that wall exists, and how it gets cleared.

The wall most churches assume is there

Putting an app in the Apple App Store is genuinely hard if you do it yourself. To get an iPhone app published, you (or someone on staff) need to:

• Open an Apple Developer account ($99/year)
• Set up your church as a legal entity in Apple's portal (D-U-N-S number, tax forms, signed agreements)
• Build the app in Xcode (or hire someone who does)
• Generate provisioning profiles and signing certificates
• Submit to App Review and respond to reviewer questions
• Maintain the app every time iOS updates

Roku is a different but parallel set of hoops:

• A Roku developer account
• Direct Publisher or BrightScript SDK setup
• Channel package, manifest, branding assets
• Submission to the Roku Channel Store and certification

Either path, alone, is a 3–6 month project for a church without a tech team. Both paths together is why we'll get a Roku channel and an iPhone app sits on the someday list at most churches forever.

So most churches reach for the workaround: a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, maybe a website with an embedded video player. None of which show up on the actual TV-app grid your members scroll past every night.

What you may not know is possible

There's an in-between path that the premium church-streaming vendors have offered for years and the rest of the market quietly ignored: someone else handles the developer accounts, app builds, and store submissions on your church's behalf, and your members find your church's app under your church's name.

To be specific: if the workflow is set up correctly, a member opens the Roku Channel Store, types in [Your Church Name], and finds your church's channel — with your logo, your colors, your description, your sermon library. Same on the Apple App Store. Fluger does not appear on the install card. The app is your church's app; we just publish it.

This matters because branded distribution is what makes a church look — to its own members and to people Googling — like a real institution rather than a hobby project. "Search 'First Baptist Springfield' on your Roku" is a different sentence than "go to youtube.com/c/firstbaptistspringfield-streams-2."

How it works at Fluger

When you sign up for Fluger and provide your church's branding — name, logo, colors, description — three things happen in the background that you don't have to do:

1. iPhone app submission. We submit your branded app to the App Store under your church's name. Your church appears as the publisher of record in members' eyes. Typical review time: 7–10 days.
2. Roku channel submission. Same workflow on the Roku Channel Store. Your members search [Your Church Name] on Roku and install.
3. Web player. A streaming home at a Fluger-hosted church URL, or your own domain if you want to point one.

The branded apps include your full sermon library, your 24/7 ministry channel, and live Sunday service.

Honest caveat for live Sunday on Roku: Live Sunday plays on your branded iPhone app today; the Roku live version is on the roadmap for summer 2026. Until then, the Roku app shows your sermon library and 24/7 ministry channel — which is most of what members watch between Sundays — and members on Roku can switch to YouTube directly for live service.

You bring the content. We handle the platforms.

Honest caveats

A few things worth saying out loud:

• Apple TV, Fire TV, and Android (phone + TV) apps are coming this summer 2026. Today, the platforms shipping are iPhone, Roku, and the web. If your members are heavily Android-first, hold off a couple of months and watch our roadmap.
• App-store review takes 7–10 days. That's Apple's and Roku's timing, not ours. The first Sunday after you sign up, your members will use the web player or your YouTube link while we wait for store approval. After that, the apps stay live.
• You still need a CCLI Streaming License if your services include music. Fluger doesn't run ContentID on your audio (your worship music plays freely), but the underlying license obligation is yours, the same way it would be for any platform.

Try it

If your church has been pushing off we should have a real app because it sounded like a six-month engineering project — it isn't. The 14-day free trial is at fluger.tv/registration. No Apple Developer account required. No Roku SDK. Hand us your branding, and your church can be on every screen your members own — searchable by name in the App Store and the Roku Channel Store, the way real institutions are.

That's the silent shift in how a church looks to its own community. Worth the weekend to set it up.