Privacy Policy for Rafiq

Rafiq is a quiet Islamic companion: prayer times and adhan reminders, qibla, the Qur'an with recitation, adhkar and tasbih, duas, the Hijri calendar, audio collections, home widgets and share cards. It has no accounts and no backend of ours. This page explains what it keeps on your device, what leaves it, and to whom.

Last updated: 13 August 2026 · Covers app version 1.48.1 and later · Package com.mohamedgado.rafiq

1. Who we are and what this covers

Rafiq (com.mohamedgado.rafiq) is built and operated by one person, Mohamed Gado. This policy covers the Rafiq Android app, any future iOS release, and this page itself. The page sets no cookies and loads nothing from another host.

You can open this policy from inside the app at any time: Settings, then Privacy policy.

2. No accounts, no server of ours

There is no sign-up, no sign-in, no profile and no sync. Rafiq operates no backend: every data source it uses is a public API run by someone else, and your device talks to those directly. There is no database of ours with users in it, because there is no database of ours at all.

The practical consequence is the strongest privacy statement we can make: we cannot see what you read, what you bookmark, when you pray, or where you are, because none of it is ever sent to us.

Most of the app also works with no network at all: prayer times can be computed on the device, and adhkar, duas, tasbih, the Hijri calendar and the full Qur'an text are bundled inside the app.

3. What stays on your device

Rafiq stores its data in a key-value store, a bundled read-only SQLite database for the Qur'an, and its own app-private files directory. All of the following is local and never uploaded:

• Settings: language, theme, calculation method, Asr school, calendar system, reciter, reading mode, translation edition, notification and salawat preferences, haptics.
• Your place: the coordinates and city label you detected or searched for, kept so prayer times work offline and widgets can refresh.
• Qur'an reading: bookmarks, last position for resume, and any mushaf page fonts the app downloaded for offline reading.
• Audio: playback history, bookmarks and where you stopped in a recitation or a collection.
• Worship counters: tasbih programs and counts, adhkar session progress, the salawat counter behind the home widget, and the prayer tracker you tick each day.
• Share drafts: the text or name you type into a greeting or share card, and the images the app renders from them.
• A cache of API responses (prayer times and calendar data) so the app opens instantly and works offline.

4. Location, prayer times and the calendar

Location is optional and requested only while you are using the app. Rafiq never asks for background location, and there is no location history, no movement profile and no advertising use.

When you grant it, your coordinates are used in three ways:

• Sent to the Aladhan API to calculate prayer times and the monthly prayer and Hijri calendar for your area.
• Sent to BigDataCloud once, to turn the coordinates into a country and city name for display.
• Used on the device to compute prayer times locally with the open-source adhan library, which is what keeps prayer times and home widgets correct while offline.

The coordinates are saved on your device so the app need not ask again. They are not stored by us, not linked to an identity, and never sent to analytics.

If you deny the permission, you can search for a city by name instead. That search sends the text you typed to Open-Meteo's geocoding service and nothing else.

5. Qibla and device sensors

The qibla compass reads your device's magnetometer and accelerometer through the OS while the qibla screen is open, and combines them with your coordinates to draw the direction. Sensor readings never leave the device, are not recorded, and are not sent to any API.

The app explicitly blocks the physical-activity recognition and microphone permissions at build time, so it cannot detect your movement or listen to anything.

6. Qur'an text, page fonts and translations

• The Arabic text ships inside the app as a read-only database, so reading the Qur'an needs no network and produces no requests.
• Mushaf page fonts for the page-accurate reading mode are downloaded per page from Quran Foundation's font host and cached in the app's own storage. The request contains a page number.
• Translations are fetched from AlQuran Cloud by surah and edition identifier.
• Word-by-word highlight timings come from the Quran.com API, requested by reciter id and surah number.

None of those requests carries an identifier, an account, or anything about you.

7. Recitation and audio collections

Per-ayah recitation is streamed from Islamic Network's CDN, or from everyayah.com for the reciters that CDN does not carry. Lecture and nasheed collections, and their cover artwork, are streamed from the Internet Archive. Each request asks for a file, and carries nothing about you.

Playback continues in the background through a media foreground service, which is why the app declares the media-playback service permissions in section 12. What you listened to, and where you stopped, is written only to your device.

8. Notifications, exact alarms and widgets

Every notification Rafiq shows is local: adhan and pre-adhan reminders, salawat reminders, and the prompts you enable in Settings. They are scheduled on your device from prayer times your device already has.

Prayer reminders must fire at an exact minute to be useful, so the app uses Android's exact-alarm permission and reschedules your alarms after a reboot. There is no push server and no device token: nothing about you is sent anywhere in order to remind you.

Home-screen widgets (next prayer, salawat, the counter, and the combined widget) are drawn by the app on your device from the same local data, on the refresh interval Android gives them.

9. Share cards, greetings and QR codes

Rafiq can render a share card, a greeting or an ayah image. The image is composed on your device, written to the app's cache directory, and handed to Android's share sheet, so it goes only where you send it. We never receive a copy, and from there the receiving app's privacy policy applies.

A name or dedication you type into a greeting stays on your device and is only baked into the image you chose to share. The QR code printed on a card encodes the app's Google Play link, nothing else: it carries no identifier and cannot be traced back to you.

10. Analytics and crash reporting

To see which screens and features are actually used and where the app crashes, Rafiq sends usage events to PostHog (EU region) and to Expo EAS Observe, which also collects startup and navigation performance.

What is sent

• Event names from a fixed list defined in the app's source, for example screen_view, quran_surah_opened, audio_started, tasbih_completed, bookmark_toggled, qibla_aligned, theme_changed, notifications_scheduled.
• Low-cardinality properties beside the event: a surah or reciter identifier, a category name, counts, enums and booleans. A search event carries the scope and the number of results, never the text you typed. A location event carries only whether the place came from GPS or from a search.
• Your current app preferences as profile traits: language, theme, calculation method and similar settings, so usage can be broken down by them.
• Technical context: app version, platform and OS version, device model, launch and navigation timings.
• Errors: uncaught JavaScript exceptions, unhandled promise rejections and errors caught by the app's own boundaries, with stack traces.
• Crashes, including the ones that never reach JavaScript. Android records every abnormal end of the app's process — the reason, the killing signal and, for a native crash, the stack of the thread that died — and Rafiq forwards those records the next time you open it, together with the app version and the time of the crash. It also notes when a previous run ended without shutting down cleanly, and how long it had been running. None of this carries anything you read, typed or saved.
• An identifier that is random and generated on your device. Since Rafiq has no accounts, there is nothing to attach it to: no name, no email, no phone number, no advertising id.
• An approximate country and city, worked out by the analytics service from the internet address your device connects from — never from the location you set in the app. The address itself is anonymised as it arrives and is not stored. This is what lets usage be read by country.

What is never sent

• The location you gave the app: your coordinates and the city you set or searched for never enter any event or property.
• Anything you read, type, bookmark or dedicate: search text, greeting names, bookmark contents, notes.
• Your name, email address, contacts or installed-app list.
• No session replay, no screen recording, no keystroke capture, no advertising identifier, and no advertising or attribution SDK. The app contains none.

11. App updates and rating

• Over-the-air updates: the app can fetch a JavaScript update from Expo's update service. The request carries the app version, the release channel, the runtime version and the platform, and nothing personal.
• Store updates: when a new version is on Google Play, the app can show Play's own in-app update prompt. That exchange is between your device and Google Play.
• Rating: the rate action opens Google Play's rating dialog. We never see more than the public review anyone can read.

12. Android permissions

13. How we secure data

What is not collected cannot leak. That is Rafiq's first security measure: no account, no password, no server, and no central database of users to breach. Beyond that:

• All network traffic uses HTTPS with certificate validation, and the release build permits no cleartext traffic.
• Your settings, bookmarks, counters and downloaded fonts live in app-private storage that Android isolates from other apps.
• The app ships no secret keys, because every source it uses is a free public API. There is nothing in the package worth stealing.
• Permissions are kept to the minimum, and unused ones are stripped (section 12).

Nobody, including the developer, can read your bookmarks or your prayer tracker remotely. If you find a vulnerability, email us before disclosing it publicly.

14. Retention and deletion

• On-device data is kept until you delete it in the app, uninstall, or clear the app's storage in Android settings. Any of those removes it permanently.
• There is no account to delete and no copy of your content with us, so there is nothing to request.
• Analytics events are held by PostHog and Expo under their own retention windows, keyed to the random per-install identifier from section 10, and deleted on request.
• Images you shared live wherever you sent them, so delete them from that destination.

15. Your rights

If you are in the EU, the UK, or California, you have rights of access, correction, deletion and objection. In practice:

• Everything the app knows about you is on your device, under your direct control, and you can inspect or wipe it without asking anyone.
• We do not sell your data, do not share it for advertising, and do not build advertising profiles from it.
• The legal basis for the anonymous analytics in section 10 is our legitimate interest in keeping the app working and improving it. Email us to have yours deleted.

16. Children's privacy

Rafiq is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them. It has no accounts, no chat, no user-generated content and no ads, so there is nothing for a child to submit to us.

17. Third-party services

These are every service your device contacts, and what it sends. Their own privacy policies govern what they do with a request:

There is no advertising network, no attribution SDK and no data broker in this list, and none in the app.

18. Changes to this policy

We update this page whenever a feature or a data source changes. The date at the top reflects the current version, the full history is public in this page's GitHub repository, and material changes are called out in the app's release notes.

19. Contact