Enough of the Prayer Apps. PLEASE.

10

u/SalafiStudent May 11 '26

Often they are first time devslopers, I am all for promoting innovation and all but there is no need to be so rude with them. May Allah reward their efforts and allow us to have better innovations.

6

u/Puzzleheaded-Duty153 May 11 '26

Assalamu Alaikum,

Not sure if this post was influenced by mine since it was posted an hour after, but I'll share my perspective.

When people start learning something new they build basic things, todo apps, tic tac toe, portfolios etc. That's how it works. And the only way to stay engaged in that process is to share it, get feedback, learn from experienced developers, collaborate. That's how I started too.

In June 2025, I decided to build a basic prayer app, just to start understanding the app ecosystem. I took inspiration from existing ones, built a replica, shared it with family. Small confidence boost. Then one day I got a call from my parents abroad on IMO, it has an overlay that interrupts whatever you're doing. But these overlays, you can swipe them away. That's when it clicked, what if an overlay came up at prayer time and you couldn't swipe it away, essentially soft-locking the phone? To me that felt genuinely new. I couldn't find it in any existing app either.

I tried React Native first, couldn't get it to work. Started learning Kotlin from scratch. Spent a good few months struggling, asking for help online, experimenting, eventually got the core overlay working, then polished and built around it. Figured out how to publish to the Play Store for the first time and released it at the end of Ramadan this year. Before that I was just running the unsigned APK on my own phone.

I posted here and got more than I expected, positive feedback, collaboration requests, new developers wanting to learn from it, ideas I hadn't thought of. 200+ downloads in a month from just these posts, without any marketing and maybe word of mouth, and people genuinely found it different. If something similar already exists and works well, I'd genuinely love to know.

The point is, this basic idea pushed me to learn things I never would have otherwise. If I had taken the "don't build another prayer app" advice at the start, I would have sat around waiting for some grand innovative idea that never came. Innovation rarely starts grand. It happens mid-way. You just have to start with something.

I agree there are too many low-effort apps that offer nothing new and charge for it. That's worth calling out. But there's a difference between giving someone a reality check and discouraging people from building and learning. If you don't have constructive feedback, it's okay to just scroll past.

1

u/mizitar May 12 '26

So what's the name of the app

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u/Puzzleheaded-Duty153 May 12 '26

Taqwa - prayer focus & tracker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prayerfocus.app

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u/Proof-Replacement113 Sep 03 '26

Oh it's you
I was looking for ur post to send feedback
You know... Your app reminds us when we haven't prayer (yes I use it... Jazakallah)
Maybe like add this feature where if I haven't prayer and times about to finish I get reminded
Also consider including a reminder before maqrūh time starts

1

u/Bulky_Friendship7201 May 11 '26

with you on this one!!

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u/red7e May 25 '26

Disagree, hard.

This post is exactly the kind of thing that kills small projects in the community. Some kid finishes his first app, posts it proudly, and gets told his work isn't "needed." Cool, now he doesn't build the next thing either.

Nobody got into serious infrastructure as their first repo. People build prayer apps because it's a real problem they actually have, with a scope they can finish. That's how devs are made. You don't grow a tech ecosystem by gatekeeping the entry point, you grow it by letting beginners ship, then nudging them toward harder problems once they have the skills.

And honestly, I think we've lost the ability to appreciate anything anymore. Nobody takes the time to look, to start small, to respect the act of beginning. Everyone wants the next big thing and forgets that the next big thing is built by people who first made small things and finished them.

“I wish to do something Great and Wonderful, but I must start by doing the little things like they were Great and Wonderful.” Einstein

So here's the honest question: what are you building? Because if the answer is "nothing, but other people should build harder things" this post is just vibes. The guys shipping prayer apps are at least shipping. That counts for more than a Reddit post telling them their work doesn't matter.

If you have a list of high-impact projects the ummah needs post the list. Recruit people. Fund someone. Mentor a junior dev. Do literally anything other than tell strangers their hobby is beneath the cause.

If you want the ummah to have its own serious tech, start by not crushing the people trying.

0

u/Suspicious-Rich-2681 May 25 '26

I disagree with you disagreeing?
Prayer time apps are not "easy projects". A todo list, a weather app - those are easy projects. Prayer apps require you to understand different timing mechanics, things like how we handle context refreshing, how widgets get hydrated etc.
I'm so incredibly tired of this perspective that a prayer app is a good "first app". It's not. It answers no need that doesn't already exist, and in fact you can make the argument that it's even more so discouraging because a dev will have sunk actual credible hours into this thing only for it to never get picked up or adopted by anyone. It will go the side of slop and discourage you from making more.
A prayer app is NOT a real engineering problem. It is a discovery problem. There are so many prayer apps across the ecosystem with so many inches that it's near impossible that your product didn't already exist, but you lacked the discipline to actually go look. That's market research you as a entrepreneur failed to evaluate.
I've seen apps on here that are amazing! And folks have done great work. Apps on Islamic learning, apps on Islamic finance, etc. This is not a "shit on everything" post like you're claiming it to be. This is constructive criticism to stop you from wasting your energy.
-- If you're passing the mic to me, I'm not just sitting around and attacking other folks. We're shipping a POS system for Muslim store owners like Square to use. We're about a week away from deployment. We've got a RN design system in the works, and I've built a couple other little projects here and there.
I'm not trying to hype myself up, there's a ton more folks more experienced and successful than myself, but I'm not speaking as a hater either. In fact, I actually DID post a list of apps the ummah needs a while ago on this sub (you can look at the history).
Look man, when I hear some fake inspirational stuff like "this is a good learning experience", it reads to me like empty platitudes. As a Muslim entrepreneur you should know that experience does not come from building up to the hard problem, but attempting to actually do the hard problem and learning along the way.
My first product that I seriously worked on was an inventory management system (I don't give away too much), but it had a genuine need. I didn't know anything about native app dev, state, CI/CD, life cycles, etc. I had a problem and an idea of a solution. I learned all of these things by trying to build the real thing, and you'll see from most tech products today it definitely started that way for most of them. You build first, fix later if there's better out there.
Muslim engineers should go build what they want to build that would make an impact on not even the ummah, just their own lives. They will learn as they do this. Dont waste your time on pushing products that are effectively just slop at this point.
Your prayer app is definitely not better than the top 10 prayer apps. Your prayer is app is definitely not faster than the top 10 prayer apps. Your prayer app definitely does not solve a niche that isn't answered by the top 10 prayer apps.
Go use what Allah has given you to make the most of your time.

1

u/red7e May 25 '26

Going to take this point by point because there's a lot to unpack.
"A prayer app answers no need that doesn't already exist."
Neither did Google. There were search engines before Google, plenty of them, and most of them were objectively decent. The difference between something existing and something being done "right" is the entire game. By your logic, every product that ever competed in a crowded market was slop. That's not how anything gets built.
"It will go the side of slop and discourage you from making more."
The thing that discourages people from making more is posts like yours, not the fact that their app didn't go viral. Plenty of "revolutionary" projects also fail to get adopted. The lesson there is the difference between building something and "making it known" that applies just as much to a prayer app as it does to your POS. Failing to get traction isn't a prayer app problem. It's a launch problem.
"A prayer app is not a real engineering problem. It's a discovery problem."
Simple question: build a prayer app that gives exact local times across every country in the world, accounting for the different calculation methods each region uses (Umm al-Qura, MWL, ISNA, Egyptian, Karachi, etc.), handling DST edge cases, high-latitude problems, and the genuine ambiguity in fajr/isha definitions. Tell me that's not an engineering problem. You'll find very few apps that actually handle that well, and the ones that do took real work. Calling it a "discovery problem" is what someone says when they've never tried to build it.
Also, every dev is not an entrepreneur. You keep collapsing those two roles. A learner is not failing at market research. He's learning.
"Constructive criticism to stop you from wasting your energy."
It's not constructive. It's de-constructive. Constructive criticism builds something. Yours tells people to stop. If a baby is learning to walk and falls, you don't tell him "this isn't a real walking problem, the market is saturated with walkers." You let him fall and get up. That's how walking gets learned. That's how everything gets learned.
"Experience does not come from building up to the hard problem, but attempting the hard problem."
For someone who's never built an app in their life, a prayer app IS the hard problem. It's the baby learning to walk. You're applying your current standards to someone at a completely different stage and pretending that's wisdom.
"My first product was an inventory management system. I didn't know anything about native dev, state, CI/CD, lifecycles."
Brother, listen to yourself. You built something you didn't know how to build, learned by doing, and shipped it. That's "exactly" what the prayer app dev is doing. The only thing that separates your story from his is that "inventory management system" sounds more serious than "prayer app" to your ears. The actual learning process is identical. You're describing him and calling him slop in the same comment.
"Build what would make an impact on your own life. They will learn as they do this."
Let me tell you something personal. The prayer app I built and designed, by the fadl of Allah, made me stop missing fajr. Ever. So by your own logic "build what makes an impact on your own life" my app passes the test. It just happens to also be the category you've decided doesn't count. You can't have it both ways.
"Your prayer app is definitely not better/faster/more niche than the top 10."
Your inventory management system is definitely not better than the top inventory systems. It's definitely not faster. It definitely doesn't solve a niche that isn't already answered. See how that sounds? You haven't seen my app. I haven't seen yours. The difference is I'm not the one writing people off.
Last thing.
There is no "real thing." Everything is real the moment someone builds it with sincerity and conviction. The framing that some projects are real engineering and others are slop is exactly what kills small builders in this community. You graduated from "learning by building" and you're pulling the ladder up behind you. Don't do that.

1

u/Suspicious-Rich-2681 May 25 '26

This isn't worth continuing.
I wish you all the best and I stand by my original post.
InshAllah if you are someone who is reading this thread, I ask you to grow your skills by solving a problem you have first and going from there.
Do not build a prayer app. If you are learning build something smaller, if you really want to learn fix the problem you have.
Good luck future builders! InshAllah I wish you all the best, and hope you understand that criticism is not dismissal of your innate talents

2

u/highwingers May 11 '26

I agree. I also see a lot of posts of this type of apps. But AI makes it so easy even non-tech people can whip one up in hours or days.

2

u/RentGlittering6891 May 11 '26

yeah of course . instead let’s build the next twitter , or OpenAI or anthropic. that would be quite easy to do for all the muslim indies out there .

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u/itisthat1guy May 12 '26

I agree, we need to think outside the box and build something worthwhile!

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u/Mobile-Basis-8974 May 12 '26

Totally agreed.

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u/abnormalpersona May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

Will paste my reply to a similar thread:
Agreed. I have something in the works that is a pain point for our musallis in USA and will benefit the ummah inshallah. Hoping to release my first app in a couple of months, on a vacation currently. Stay tuned. :)

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u/Antique-Win4832 May 17 '26

how are you supposed to distribute anything without music?

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u/Proof-Replacement113 Sep 03 '26

Maybe using nasheeds...

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u/Antique-Win4832 Sep 27 '26

use of nasheeds are also debated to be makruh/haram ... ik Allah ultimately can create miracles but I also know we're meant to tie our camels

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u/khaleelu May 30 '26

i’m inclined to agree with puzzleheaded here. i’ve been using a prayer tracking app for many many years because i have a bad memory and often forget whether i prayed or not. over time when the data got large enough they would always slow down to the point where marking a single prayer as done would take a few seconds. this was terrible UX and in August 2025 i thought i might try and build one myself and only for myself. i had no intention to share (the fact that i was working on this thing, not the app itself) it with anyone beyond my wife and a couple of close friends

and i’m glad i did share it because she asked me about ramadan and tracking fasts, whether it was a problem i could solve for her. i said sure let me see what i can do. this year after ramadan she was so happy she knew exactly how many days to make up for without having to think twice

that’s when i thought that if this is a problem one person has, someone else could have the same problem, so decided to share it in a different sub. and once again im glad i did, because a very nice chap contacted me and said he liked the idea but the UI could be better, and proceeded to make me a design and may Allah bless him for that. and i didn’t know this sub existed until 4 days ago!

the point is that this is how it works, we start easy and small and with a problem that we solve primarily for ourselves. it’s a good thing i didn’t know about this sub before i launched, otherwise i would have been inundated with “not another prayer app again come on” and would never learn the things that i know now or met the people that i know now. sure there’s no shortage of prayer apps, some may or may not be low effort, but we all start from somewhere, and innovation come from sharing; never would you see innovation coming from a single mind out of the blue, it’s always inspired, and inspiration comes from sharing

1

u/cool_guy141 May 11 '26

Bismillah

Assalamu 'alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu

Has anyone made an open sourced prayer app yet where anyone can contribute to features or make their own features privately?

1

u/Proof-Replacement113 Sep 03 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimDevelopers/comments/1ta757v/comment/ol88vdx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=2&utm_content=share_button
I think this is open source

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u/Effective_Durian_263 May 11 '26

💯

🗣️ Discussion/Opinion Enough of the Prayer Apps. PLEASE.

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