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A prayer times app without ads: what to check
Plenty of apps say "no ads". Fewer say what else they do. Here is a practical checklist you can run in five minutes on any prayer app, including ours.
The checklist
- Ads. Open the app for a few minutes on the free plan. Banners, interstitials and "sponsored" cards all count.
- Trackers. On iPhone, look at the App Store privacy label ("Data Used to Track You"). On Android, the Data safety section. Compare it with what the app needs to show five times.
- Permissions. A prayer app needs location at most once to choose a city, and it can work with just a city name. Be wary of contacts, microphone or constant background location.
- Account. Does it work without signing up? Times and Qibla do not need an account.
- Offline. Switch to airplane mode. Calculation on the device should still show the day's times.
- Method transparency. Does it tell you which calculation method, Asr school and high-latitude rule it uses? Times you cannot explain are hard to trust. See calculation methods.
- Reminder honesty. Does it say what its reminders cannot do, such as ringing in silent mode? See Fajr alarm.
- Verifiability. Can you check the claim yourself? Sakina's privacy ledger is one way; the network tab of a browser is another.
Why this matters
Worship is a setting where people rarely want to be profiled or marketed to. An app that needs to monetise attention has an incentive to add more screens and more data collection over time. An app that only calculates and displays times does not need any of that.
How Sakina scores
| Check | Sakina web app |
|---|---|
| Ads | None |
| Trackers and analytics | None |
| Permissions | None required. Location and compass only if you press the buttons |
| Account | None |
| Offline | Yes, after the first visit |
| Method shown | Yes, on every screen that shows times |
| Reminders | While the app is open, plus calendar export. Background alarm is not promised |
| Verifiable | Privacy ledger and a strict content security policy |
Last verified 7 November 2026. We will update this page when the app changes.
Frequently asked questions
Is a free prayer app without ads sustainable?
The web app is a small calculation tool with no servers per user, so it is cheap to run. A paid native app with extra features is the planned way to fund development.
What should I do if an app asks for background location?
Decline and choose a city manually. Prayer times change by at most a minute or two within a city.