Support

Reminders, and why one might not fire

Simple Prayer's reminders are local notifications: the app calculates prayer times on your phone and asks the phone itself to deliver alerts at those moments. There is no server involved — which is why they work offline, and also why the phone's own settings are almost always the reason one goes missing.

Three kinds exist, each configurable per prayer in Settings → Reminders:

• Adhan-time alert — at the prayer time, with your choice of silent, the system sound, or a short adhan clip.
• Pre-reminder — a set number of minutes before, made for waking up to Fajr.
• End-of-window nudge — near the end of a prayer's window, only if that prayer is still unlogged. Log it and the nudge is cancelled on the spot. Isha's nudge is timed off Islamic midnight, so it never rings at 3 am.

The app schedules a rolling window of about five days ahead (iOS allows an app at most 64 pending notifications) and refreshes the schedule every time you open the app, change a relevant setting, or change location.

Start with the reminder health screen

Settings → Reminders → reminder health shows exactly what is currently scheduled on your phone, warns if the system has purged the schedule, and has a “send a test notification” button. If the test arrives, delivery works and the cause is one of the settings below.

On iPhone

• Focus and Do Not Disturb silence notifications unless the app is allowed: Settings → Focus → your Focus → Allowed Notifications.
• Check the app's notification permissions: iOS Settings → Notifications → Simple Prayer — allow notifications, and enable sound and banners.
• The adhan clip is short by design. iOS caps any notification sound at 30 seconds, so the bundled clip is a brief excerpt, not a full adhan. That's an Apple limit, not a setting.
• Silent mode and Ring/Silent switches still apply to notification sounds.

On Android

• Battery optimisation is the usual culprit. Android may freeze apps in the background and drop their scheduled alarms. Set Simple Prayer's battery usage to “Unrestricted” (Settings → Apps → Simple Prayer → Battery).
• Some manufacturers add their own, more aggressive task killers on top — Samsung (“Sleeping apps”), Xiaomi (Autostart), Huawei (App launch), Oppo/OnePlus (Battery optimisation). The reminder health screen shows the guidance for your device.
• The app asks for the exact alarm and run-at-startup permissions so reminders land on the right minute and survive a restart — these are scheduling permissions and read nothing.
• An optional ongoing notification (off by default) can keep the current and next prayer visible in your notification shade.

Matching times to your local mosque

Prayer times are calculated on your device from your approximate position. Out of the box the app picks the calculation authority used in your country — shown transparently as, for example, “Auto (Diyanet)” — and you can always override it.

1. Settings → Prayer times → Calculation method. The full list includes Diyanet (Turkey), ISNA (North America), Umm al-Qura, Egyptian, Karachi, Moonsighting Committee, Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Singapore, Tehran, Jafari, and Muslim World League.
2. Asr madhab: Shafi (the default) or Hanafi — this is the most common reason an Asr time “looks wrong”.
3. Per-prayer adjustments: each prayer can be shifted −30 to +30 minutes. If your mosque follows a printed calendar with safety margins (temkin), match it here, prayer by prayer.
4. High-latitude rule for northern summers, and a Hijri date offset (±2 days) if your community's moon sighting differs.

Settings always shows the named authority plus any offsets you've applied, so you can see at a glance why a time is what it is.

Exemption mode

For menstruation and postnatal days. Turn it on in Settings → Tracking, then mark exempt periods as simple date ranges — “exempt from” and “exempt until”.

• Exempt days are shown with a neutral seal and the caption “exempt”. They are never rendered as missed, never counted in your statistics, and never nudged — all reminders are automatically suppressed on those days.
• Streaks continue through exempt days rather than breaking.
• The qada estimator uses your average exempt days per month (default 7, adjustable) so an estimated backlog isn't inflated.
• This is not a period tracker: there is no prediction and no health data — the app stores nothing beyond the date ranges you enter, on your phone, like everything else.

Making up missed prayers (qada)

Qada is tracked as a per-prayer debt that counts down — progress toward relief, not a growing pile.

• Starting out: the first time you open qada, a short (skippable) setup asks whether to estimate a past period — “from when to when did you miss prayers?”, computing a per-prayer debt you can hand-edit — or to start from zero, where only misses you log from now on accumulate.
• Day to day: logging a prayer as missed adds one to that prayer's debt. While you owe anything, a compact card sits under the Today list with a one-tap “+1 made up”; tap the card for the full screen with per-prayer counters, your recent pace, and a projected debt-free date.
• From History: any past missed prayer can be marked “made up” from its day's detail — it then shows as missed-but-resolved and reduces the debt.
• Start fresh: inside the qada screen you can forgive and archive the whole debt. The history is preserved, the counters return to zero, and you have 30 days to undo it in the same place.

Streaks and editing your history

• Two modes in Settings → Tracking: Relaxed — a day counts when at least one prayer is prayed or prayed late — and Committed — a day counts only when all five are.
• Every log is editable forever. Open History, tap any past day, and change any prayer — a mistap or a forgotten evening never permanently breaks anything.
• Exempt days bridge a streak. Unlogged days are never silently turned into misses.
• Today's streak is provisional until the day completes at the following Fajr — the day runs Fajr to Fajr, so an Isha logged after midnight still belongs to the right day.

Location and choosing a city

• “Use my location” asks for approximate position only — never precise, never in the background — and only when you tap it.
• Or type a city in Settings → Location. The app is fully functional with a hand-picked city and no location permission at all, and it will never nag you about it.
• Naming your city is the one moment your approximate position leaves the phone — to your phone's own map service (Apple's or Google's), never to us. The privacy policy covers this in detail.

Exporting your data

Settings → Data exports everything the app has recorded — logs, qada, exempt periods, settings — as CSV or JSON, handed to your phone's share sheet. Save it, send it, or open it anywhere; the app uploads nothing itself. Since all data lives on your phone, this is also your backup before switching devices.

Getting in touch

Write to privacy@simpleprayer.app — for support, privacy questions, wrong-times reports (please include your city and your mosque's expected times), or anything else. A crash report can only tell us the app broke — never who you are or what felt wrong — so we genuinely rely on people telling us when something is off.