Privacy Policy

Effective 15 September 2026.

Simple Prayer does not collect anything about who you are or how you worship. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Your prayer log lives on your phone.

There is one exception, and you have to go and turn it on: if you add a prayer buddy, the prayers you mark are sent to their phone. Nothing else about you goes with them — no name, no location, nothing that says who you are — and if you never add a buddy, nothing you record leaves your phone at all.

This page explains all of it, including the five cases where something does leave your phone — because all five are real, and none of them identifies you.

The short version

• We collect nothing about you. No name, no email, no advertising identifier, no usage analytics. The only thing we receive at all is anonymous crash reporting — whether the app crashed or ran cleanly — described below, and you can switch it off in Settings.
• Everything you record stays on your phone — prayer logs, history, qada counts, exempt days, settings. The one exception is buddy mode, which is off unless you turn it on: it sends the prayers you mark to a person you chose, and nothing else.
• There is almost nothing of yours to delete from our side. Without buddy mode we never receive anything you record at all. With it, the relay holds a pairing and at most a day of marks — and turning buddy mode off deletes both. Uninstalling the app removes everything on the phone.
• Five things leave your phone toward the internet, all described below: a city lookup that goes to your phone's own map service, an update check that carries no personal data, anonymous crash reporting (with an off switch in Settings), — only if you choose to leave a tip — a purchase through the App Store or Google Play, and — only if you add a buddy — the prayers you mark, carried to their phone.
• If you use a watch, your phone copies your times and your marks to your own watch — phone to watch, over the connection the two devices already have. It does not travel through us or through the internet. "Your watch and your other screens" below explains exactly what is copied.

What is stored on your phone

All of the following is written to storage that belongs to the app on your device, and is never uploaded anywhere:

• Prayer logs — for each prayer: prayed, prayed late, or missed; when you logged it; when a missed prayer was made up.
• Exempt periods — the start and end days you mark when exemption mode is on. These are health-related, and they are treated exactly like everything else here: written to your device, read only by the app on your device, never transmitted.
• Qada counters and their history — the per-prayer debt, and the record of increases, make-ups and "start fresh" resets that lets the app undo one.
• Your settings — calculation method, madhab, offsets, reminder configuration, theme, language, and your chosen location (its coordinates and city label, whether it came from the device or from a city you typed).
• A count of the tips you have given, if you ever give one. A number, nothing else.

Technically this is a SQLite database and two small key-value stores inside the app's own private storage. Other apps cannot read them.

If you use your phone's own backup service (iCloud Backup, Google One backup), this data may be included in your backup, under your own account and your own control. That backup is between you and Apple or Google; we have no access to it and no way to ask for it.

What leaves your phone, and to whom

1. Naming your city

Prayer times and the Qibla direction need to know roughly where you are. Two paths, and you choose which:

• "Use my location" — the app asks for approximate location only, and only when you tap that button. It never asks for precise location, never asks for background or "Always" location, and never prompts on its own at launch. The position it receives is coarse, on the order of a few kilometres.
• Typing a city — you type a place name and pick from the results.

In both cases the app hands the coordinates or the typed name to your phone's own map service — Apple's on iOS, Google's on Android — to turn it into a city name. That lookup is a network service run by Apple or Google, so this is the one moment your approximate position goes off your device. It goes to your phone's platform provider, under their privacy policy, and never to us. We do not receive it, then or ever — the app has no server that your location is sent to, and the city name that comes back stays on your phone.

We are explicit about this rather than claiming your location "never leaves your device", which would not be true. What is true is that it never reaches us.

• Apple's privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/
• Google's privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

You can skip this entirely: deny the location permission and choose a city by hand. The app works completely, and nothing about it nags you to change your mind. You can also change or clear your location at any time in Settings → Location.

2. Checking for an app update

When the app starts, it asks our update service whether a newer version of the app's code is available, so that fixes can reach you without waiting for a store release. That request carries only what is needed to answer it: which platform you are on, which version of the app you are running, and a random identifier generated when the app was installed, which distinguishes one installation from another and is not connected to you, your phone's identity, or anything you have recorded in the app. Like any internet request it also carries your IP address.

This check is run for us by Expo (Expo/EAS Update), which operates the service on our behalf. It sends no prayer log, no location, no settings and no personal information. It is the app asking "is there a newer version?", and nothing more.

Expo's privacy policy: https://expo.dev/privacy

3. Leaving a tip (optional, and only if you use it)

The app is free forever and has no paid features. If you choose to leave a tip in Settings, that is a normal in-app purchase:

• Apple or Google processes the payment. They handle your payment details. We never see your name, your card, or your billing address.
• RevenueCat, Inc. handles the purchase on our behalf. When you open the tip section, the app asks RevenueCat for the current prices; if you complete a tip, the store's purchase receipt is sent to RevenueCat to be validated. In doing so RevenueCat receives an anonymous identifier it generates for the installation, the purchase receipt or token, basic device and app information, and the IP address any internet request carries. That identifier is not linked to a name, an email or an account, because there is no account to link it to. The app does not ask RevenueCat to collect advertising identifiers.
• We keep only a count. The app stores, on your phone, how many tips you have given, so it can say thank you. Nothing more.

RevenueCat's privacy policy: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy

If you never open the tip section, none of this happens.

4. If the app crashes (and you can turn this off)

If the app crashes, it sends us one crash report, so we can find the bug and fix it. Here is exactly what is in it:

• where the app's own code was when it crashed (a stack trace),
• your device model and operating system version (say, an iPhone 13 on iOS 18), and the app's version.

The same report, with the same contents, is also sent for one error the app catches and survives: a failure to open or upgrade its database when it starts. And so that we can tell "crashes rarely" from "crashes constantly", the reporting also sends an anonymous marker when the app starts and ends a session — app version and device class, nothing more. The ratio of clean sessions to crashed ones is the number we watch.

And what is not in any of it: no prayer log, no location, no city, no name, no email, and no record of what you did in the app — no screenshots, no screen recordings, no tap-by-tap trail. We have configured the reporting to strip personal information, and we never tag reports with any kind of user identity — there is none in this app to tag them with. A crash report tells us the app broke; it cannot tell us who you are.

The reports are processed for us by Sentry, on their servers in the European Union, and are deleted after 90 days. Like any internet request, the report reaches Sentry from your IP address; we have told the SDK not to attach it to the report.

You can switch this off in Settings, any time. It takes effect the next time the app starts — the switch says so — and from then on the app sends neither crash reports nor session markers. It changes nothing else about the app.

Sentry's privacy policy: https://sentry.io/privacy/

5. Prayer buddies (optional, off until you turn it on)

Buddy mode lets you and someone you choose — a partner, a sibling, a friend — see that the other prayed today. It is off when you install the app, nothing in the app asks you to use it, and you can turn it off again at any time.

What your buddy sees. That you prayed. Late counts as prayed. That is the whole of it.

What your buddy never sees. A prayer you missed. A prayer you have not marked yet. An excused day. Your qada count, your streak, your history, or anything at all from any day but today. A row with nothing on it means nothing arrived — it does not mean you did not pray, and the app has no way to say that even if it wanted to.

What we hold, and for how long. Sending a mark to your buddy's phone means passing it through a small server of ours, called a relay. The relay holds:

• a random identifier for your installation, a random identifier for theirs, and the fact that the two are paired. It forgets this when either of you unpairs, when either of you turns buddy mode off, or after 90 days with nothing sent;
• the mark itself — "prayed Maghrib today" — for as long as it takes their phone to collect it, or 24 hours at most, whichever comes first. Then it is deleted;
• a push token for each phone, so a notification can be delivered. It is stored encrypted.

It does not hold your name, your email address, your phone number, your location, your language, a profile, a history, or any record of what you have marked in the past. It keeps no logs: not of requests, not of addresses, not of who sent what to whom. Its entire source code is public, so you do not have to take our word for any of this:

https://github.com/majani-plus/simple-prayer-relay

No account. Pairing works by a one-time code that expires in 24 hours. There is still no sign-up, no email address and no password anywhere in this app.

What your buddy is called is yours alone. You pick an icon, a colour and a name for each buddy, on your phone. They never learn what you chose, and none of it is ever sent anywhere. Two people who paired with each other may picture each other completely differently.

Leaving. Removing a buddy takes effect immediately and deletes the pairing from the relay, along with anything in flight between you. You do not need their agreement and they are not told who ended it. Turning buddy mode off removes every pairing and deletes your installation's record from the relay entirely.

6. Nothing else

That is the complete list. In particular:

• No analytics. There is no analytics or usage-tracking SDK in this app of any kind. Crash reporting above is the whole of our telemetry: it speaks only when the app breaks, and never about you.
• No advertising and no ad networks, now or later.
• No account, no sign-in, no email address.
• No leaderboards, no profiles, nothing public. Buddy mode shares one thing with one person you chose, and there is no feed, no ranking, no follower count and nowhere for anybody else to see anything. Your worship is not content.

Your watch and your other screens

The app also shows your prayers on an Apple Watch, on a Wear OS watch, in home-screen and lock-screen widgets, and on tablets. None of these talk to the internet, and none of them send anything to us. Two of them are worth explaining plainly.

Your watch holds a copy of your times and your marks. So that the watch keeps working when your phone is in another room, your phone sends it a bundle covering about two weeks: the prayer times for those days, the words already translated, the direction of the qibla, when your reminders are due, and — because the watch shows your seals — which prayers you have marked, and which days are marked excused. That bundle travels from your phone to your watch over the connection the two devices already have (Bluetooth or your own Wi-Fi, handled by Apple or Google's own watch software). It does not pass through any server of ours, and we never see it.

The same is true in reverse: when you mark a prayer on the watch, the watch holds that single mark until your phone is reachable, hands it to the phone, and the phone writes it into your log. If you stop using the watch, deleting the watch app removes its copy.

Exempt days are health-related, so to be exact about them: the excused-day flag for each day in that two-week window is part of the bundle above, because the watch draws those days as excused rather than as missed. It stays between your phone and your watch, exactly like everything else here.

Widgets and the watch read the same kind of copy on your own device. A widget, a complication, a tile and the always-on notification are drawn by the system, not by the app, so the app leaves them a small pre-written summary in storage that belongs to the app on your device. Nothing about a widget or a complication leaves your device.

Location on the watch. If you open the qibla compass on the Apple Watch, watchOS asks the watch for permission to read your heading — which way the watch is pointing. It is used to turn the compass dial and nothing else, it is never written down, and it never leaves the watch. The direction of the qibla itself was already worked out on your phone.

The "Manuscript" watch face (the separate watch-face app on Google Play) is a design file rather than a program: it contains no code that can run, no network access, and it collects nothing. It shows the prayer information the Simple Prayer watch app provides. Without that app installed, it is simply a watch face.

Notifications

Adhan alerts, pre-reminders and end-of-window nudges are local notifications. Your phone schedules them from times the app calculated on your phone. No message travels over a network, and their text is generated on your device and stays there.

Buddy notifications are the exception, and only exist if you add a buddy. Those arrive as push notifications, so the app registers a push token with Apple's or Google's notification service — which is a random identifier for your installation, not for you. The words in a buddy notification are written by your buddy's phone, in your language, and passed through; our relay never composes them and cannot read anything about you in them.

Exporting your data

Settings → Data lets you export everything the app has stored as a CSV or JSON file. The app writes that file into its own temporary storage and hands it to your phone's standard share sheet — you decide where it goes, and it goes only there. It is not uploaded anywhere by the app. The temporary copy is deleted the next time you export.

Permissions the app asks for

• Approximate location — to calculate prayer times and the Qibla direction, as described above. Optional; the app works with a city you choose by hand. Foreground only.
• Notifications — to deliver the reminders you turn on. Optional.
• Exact alarms, run at startup, vibrate (Android) — so reminders fire at the right minute and survive a restart. These are scheduling permissions; they read nothing.
• On the watch: heading (Apple Watch) and notifications (Wear OS) — the heading turns the qibla dial on your wrist and never leaves the watch; the notification permission lets the Wear app sound the adhan when your phone is away. Both optional, both asked for on the watch itself.

The app blocks precise location, camera, microphone, contacts and activity recognition outright, so they cannot be requested even by accident.

Children

The app is suitable for all ages and is rated accordingly. Because we collect no personal information from anyone, we collect none from children either — there is nothing here to age-gate, no profile to build and no data to sell.

Your choices

• Use a city instead of your location — nothing is ever sent to a map service except the city name you type.
• Turn off crash reports in Settings, any time. The app keeps working exactly the same.
• Export your data at any time, in a plain format you can open anywhere.
• Turn off buddy mode, if you ever turned it on. That deletes every pairing and your installation's record from the relay, and removes your buddies from this phone.
• Delete everything by uninstalling the app. That removes the database and all settings from your device. There is no copy anywhere else, and no account to close. If you had buddy mode on, turn it off first — an uninstalled app cannot tell the relay to forget the pairing, though the relay drops it by itself after 90 quiet days.
• Ask us for your data, or for it to be deleted — write to the address below. We hold almost nothing about you to give you or to delete: crash reports carry no identity we could look you up by, and they delete themselves after 90 days. Buddy mode's relay holds a pairing between two random identifiers and at most a day of marks, with nothing that would let us find you in it — turning buddy mode off deletes it, and we cannot look it up for you because there is no name or address on it. The other exception is a tip, if you have given one: the record of that purchase sits with Apple or Google and with RevenueCat, and we will pass a deletion request on to them.

The website

simpleprayer.app sets no cookies, runs no analytics and embeds no third-party trackers. It does not know you visited.

One page does more than show words. simpleprayer.app/times shows today's prayer times, so it needs to know where you are. You can let your browser tell it, or you can pick a city from a list. Either way the location stays on your device. The page works the times out itself, and it is not allowed to send anything to us or to anyone else.

The location you choose is saved in your browser so the page does not have to ask again. It is not a cookie, and it is never sent anywhere. If you add the page to your home screen, your browser also keeps a copy of the pages themselves so they still work with no internet. That copy is our own pages, nothing about you. You can remove all of it by clearing this site's data in your browser settings.

Changes to this policy

If the app ever starts doing something this page does not describe, this page changes first, the date at the top changes with it, and the change is called out in the release notes. Given what this app is, we do not expect that to happen often.

Contact

Questions about privacy: privacy@simpleprayer.app

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Simple Prayer is made by Ronny Majani. It is free, contains no advertising, and asks nothing of you.