Support

Why didn't my reminder arrive?

The app calculates the prayer times on your phone and asks the phone itself to show a reminder at each time. No server is involved. That is why reminders work offline. It is also why your phone's own settings are almost always the reason a reminder does not appear.

There are four kinds. The first three can be set for each prayer in Settings → Reminders:

• At the prayer time — silent, the normal phone sound, or a short adhan clip. You choose.
• Before the prayer — a set number of minutes early. This one is made for waking up for Fajr.
• Before the time runs out — a last reminder, and only if you have not marked that prayer yet. Mark it and this reminder is cancelled straight away. For Isha it is timed by Islamic midnight, so it never wakes you at 3 in the morning.
• The sunrise note — Fajr is the only prayer whose time ends at sunrise instead of at the next prayer. If Fajr is still unmarked, a silent note at sunrise tells you its time has ended and when Dhuhr is.

The app schedules reminders about five days ahead (iOS allows an app at most 64 waiting notifications). It refreshes this schedule every time you open the app, change a related setting, or change your location.

Start with the Reminder reliability screen

Settings → Reminders → Reminder reliability shows exactly what is scheduled on your phone right now. It warns you if the system has deleted the schedule, and it 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 block 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 turn on sound and banners.
• The adhan sound is short on purpose. iOS limits every notification sound to 30 seconds, so the included recording is a short part of the adhan, not the full adhan. This is an Apple limit, not a setting.
• Silent mode and the Ring/Silent switch also apply to notification sounds.

On Android

• Battery settings are usually the cause. Android can freeze apps that are not open and forget their reminders. Set Simple Prayer's battery use to “Unrestricted” (Settings → Apps → Simple Prayer → Battery).
• Some phone makers add their own tools that close background apps: Samsung (“Sleeping apps”), Xiaomi (Autostart), Huawei (App launch), Oppo and OnePlus (Battery optimisation). The reminder health screen shows the steps for your phone.
• On Android 14 and later, your phone does not let an app set a reminder for an exact minute until you allow it. The app offers this once during setup, and the reminder health screen has the same button at any time. Without it reminders still arrive, but they can be a few minutes late. The app also uses a run-at-startup permission, so reminders keep working after a restart. These are scheduling permissions only — they read nothing.
• Android 16 can sort notifications into groups such as Promotions or Suggested, and a reminder placed in a group arrives without a sound. If that happens, open Settings → Notifications → Notification organizer on your phone, and leave Simple Prayer out of it.
• An optional ongoing notification (off unless you turn it on) can keep the current and next prayer visible in your notification area.

How do I match the times to my mosque?

Prayer times are calculated on your phone, from your approximate location. From the start, the app picks the calculation method used in your country. The name is always shown, for example “Auto (Diyanet)”, and you can change it at any time.

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 moved from −30 to +30 minutes. If your mosque follows a printed calendar with safety margins (temkin), match it here, one prayer at a time.
4. A high-latitude rule for summers in the far north, and a Hijri date offset (±2 days) if your community sees the new moon on a different day.

Settings always shows which method is being used and any changes you have made, so you can always see where a time comes from.

How do the widgets work?

A widget shows the times on your home screen, on iPhone and Android. To add one, touch and hold an empty spot on the home screen, then look for Simple Prayer: on iPhone under Edit → Add Widget, on Android under Widgets. To remove one, touch and hold the widget itself.

• The seal on a widget is the real seal. Tap it and the current prayer is marked as prayed. Tap it again to undo. A widget never marks a prayer late or missed — those choices stay in the app, where a wrong touch is harder to make.
• Widgets read from a schedule of times the app prepares about two weeks ahead. Opening the app renews it.
• If the app has not been opened for a long time, a widget says “Times need a refresh” instead of showing times it cannot promise. Open the app once and the widget is current again.

What does the watch app do?

On Apple Watch and Wear OS, the app shows today’s prayers with the one-tap seal, and the qibla. On Apple Watch, the next prayer can sit on your watch face. On Wear OS there is also a tile. A watch face of our own, called Manuscript, is coming soon.

• Your watch keeps up to two weeks of times, so it stays right even when your phone is far away.
• A prayer you mark on the watch is kept on the watch, and lands in the app the next time the watch and the phone are near each other.
• On Wear OS, when the phone is away, the watch itself can sound the adhan at prayer time. When the phone is near, the phone’s own reminder appears on the watch instead — you never get the same reminder twice.
• The watch works together with the phone app: the phone calculates the times and the watch shows them, so the two always agree.

What about days I can't pray?

Excused days are for menstruation and the days after childbirth. Turn them on in Settings → Tracking. No prayers are owed for those days. This is the agreed ruling, and the app follows it. When you begin, you choose how long: until you end it yourself, or a number of days — and then it ends by itself, and you never need to remember it.

• An excused day is shown with a plain seal and the words “not required”. It is never shown as missed and never counted in your statistics. Reminders pause while excused days last, and you can choose to keep them on when you turn the mode on.
• A streak continues through excused days. It does not end.
• When the app estimates how many prayers you owe, you can tell it how many excused days you usually have in a month. It takes those days out of the estimate, so the number is not larger than it should be.
• This is not a period tracker. It predicts nothing and stores no health data. Like everything else in the app, excused days stay on your phone and nowhere else.

How do missed prayers (qada) work?

Qada means the prayers you still owe. The app keeps a count for each prayer, and the count goes down as you make them up.

• Starting out: the first time you open the qada screen, a short setup asks how you want to begin. You can estimate a past period — it asks from when to when you missed prayers, works out a count for each prayer, and lets you change the numbers by hand. Or you can start from zero, and count only the prayers you mark as missed from now on. You can skip this setup.
• Day to day: marking a prayer as missed adds one to the count for that prayer. While you still owe prayers, a small card under the Today list shows how many are left. Tap it to open the full screen, with a count for each prayer, how fast you are going, and the date you should be finished. Making a prayer up is done on that screen, not from Today.
• From History: open any past day and mark a missed prayer as “made up”. It then shows as missed but made up, and the count goes down by one.
• Start fresh: on the qada screen you can clear the whole count at once. Your history is kept, the counts go back to zero, and you have 30 days to undo it in the same place.

How do streaks work? Can I fix past days?

• There are two modes in Settings → Tracking. In Relaxed, a day counts when you have prayed at least one prayer, on time or late. In Committed, a day counts only when all five are marked.
• You can change any day, at any time. Open History, tap a past day, and change any prayer. A wrong tap or a forgotten evening is never permanent.
• Excused days do not end a streak. A day you did not mark is never turned into a day you missed.
• Today's streak is not final until the day ends at the next Fajr. A day runs from one Fajr to the next, so an Isha you mark after midnight still counts for the right day.

Does the app need my location?

• “Use my location” asks for your rough position only. Never your exact position, and never while the app is closed. It only asks when you tap it.
• Or type a city in Settings → Location. The app works completely with a city you picked yourself and no location permission at all, and it will not keep asking.
• Naming your city is the one time your rough position leaves the phone. It goes to your phone's own map service, made by Apple or Google, and never to us. The privacy policy explains this in detail.

How do I export or back up my data?

Settings → Data saves everything the app has recorded — your prayer log, your qada counts, your excused days and your settings — as a CSV or JSON file, and hands it to your phone to share. Save it, send it, or open it anywhere you like. The app never uploads it. Because everything is kept on your phone, this file is also your backup before you move to a new phone.

How do I get in touch?

Write to [email protected] for help, for privacy questions, or for anything else. If a prayer time looks wrong, please tell us your city and the times your mosque uses. A crash report only tells us that the app broke. It never tells us who you are, or what went wrong for you, so we really do depend on people writing to us.

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