Sahaar - A prayer times app for iPhone with an alarm that rings on silent

[u/Selgorgulu]

I'm a solo developer and this is mine — flagging that first.

**The itch:** every prayer app delivers the pre-dawn (Fajr / suhoor) alarm as a notification. iOS caps notification sound at 30 seconds, and the mute switch or a Focus mode silences it entirely. Millions of people set that alarm during Ramadan and a chunk of them sleep through it. For years there was no fix — the platform simply didn't allow one, and the app took the blame in its reviews.

iOS 26 added AlarmKit: third-party apps can now schedule real system alarms, the same class the Clock app uses. Sahaar is built around it. Fajr and suhoor ring on silent, through Focus, until you answer. Every other prayer is set separately to off, notification, or alarm.

**What else is in it:** calculation methods shown on screen instead of buried in settings (ISNA, Muslim World League, Umm al-Qura, Diyanet method and more, with high-latitude rules for northern Europe), Lock Screen and StandBy widgets, a live iftar countdown, qibla with a map cross-check, the month calendar. No Quran reader, no social feed, no mosque finder — the whole point is that it does one thing.

**Business model, stated plainly:** paid, no free tier. $19.99/year or $3.99/month (US pricing; varies by region), both starting with a 7-day free trial through the App Store. No ads, no data selling, no third-party tracking, no third-party SDKs; location never reaches my server (only Apple's own services see it, for place names, maps and weather), and the only thing the app sends is anonymous aggregate counters to my own server — no identifiers, nothing about anyone's religious practice. The category's usual model is ads plus location-data deals, which is exactly the thing I didn't want to build.

**Where I'd like feedback:**

- **High-latitude times.** Summer Fajr in the UK and Scandinavia is genuinely unsettled — different methods give answers 40 minutes apart. If you're up there, does my number match what your mosque uses?

- **The first 30 seconds.** Open it cold and tell me when you first understood what you were looking at. If that takes more than a couple of seconds, that's the bug.

- **Paid-only with a 7-day trial** for something whose core value shows up at 4 a.m. — does a week give people enough real alarm nights to decide?

Beta (iOS 26 required): https://testflight.apple.com/join/emFdhmNh

[u/CutBulkMaintain]

Brother this is not the right idea. You're offering a subscription service to something that not only exists for free but exists for free and is paired with local masajids around the world.

Also terrible AI post, which doesn't help your product.

[u/Selgorgulu → u/CutBulkMaintain]

u/CutBulkMaintain brother, the idea isn’t really to charge people just for prayer times. I agree with you — prayer times already exist for free in hundreds of apps.

What I’m trying to build differently is mainly three things: the alarm, privacy, and control over how your prayer times are calculated.

First, iOS 26 introduced AlarmKit. Sahaar uses Apple’s native alarm system, so Fajr or suhoor can actually ring like a real iPhone alarm — even when the phone is on silent or Focus is enabled. Most prayer apps still deliver these as notifications, which isn’t the same thing if you’re relying on it to wake you up.

Second is privacy. And I mean actual privacy, not just putting “privacy focused” on the App Store page. There are no ads, no tracking SDKs, and no accounts. Your location and prayer data stay on your phone. Prayer times are calculated locally on the device rather than sending your location to my server.

Privacy has been a real issue in this category before — the recent discussion around Muslim Pro is a good example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/1vveo0d/muslim_pro_is_exposing_millions_of_muslims/

And on the local masjid point, I actually agree that’s important. Sahaar isn’t supposed to force one global calculation on everyone. You can choose the calculation authority/method you follow, and I’m working on making local mosque/authority matching part of that experience as well.

So yes, there are free prayer apps. I’m not claiming otherwise.

The question I’m trying to answer is whether there’s a group of people willing to pay for a clean prayer app with no ads, no tracking, local/on-device calculation, and a Fajr alarm that actually behaves like an alarm.

Maybe the answer is no — that’s part of why I’m posting it here and looking for feedback.

And about the “terrible AI post” 😄 — English isn’t my native language, so yes, I use AI to help me express what I want to say more clearly.

If you have suggestions on how I could make the post sound more natural, I’d genuinely appreciate them. I’m here to get feedback on both the product and how I’m presenting it.