We Built a Prayer App to Stop Our Phones Stealing Prayer Time

Prayer time did not disappear because we forgot it.

It disappeared because our phones made it easy to delay.

One scroll became another. A quick check became ten minutes. Then my roommate and I would look at the clock and realise that Asr had passed while we were still holding our phones.

We already had prayer apps. We already had notifications. But notifications were easy to dismiss, especially when the app we were using was designed to keep us there.

So we started building something different.

The idea behind Prayer Guard

Prayer Guard is a feature inside Furqanly, our Muslim prayer app.

It pauses the distracting apps you choose during a prayer window. Instead of sending another notification that disappears immediately, it creates a small moment where you have to decide what to do.

You can mark that you prayed, snooze for five or fifteen minutes, skip the current reminder, or continue to the next prayer.

It is not meant to shame anyone. It is meant to interrupt the automatic habit of opening the same distracting apps again.

Building it with React Native

We built Furqanly with React Native so we could share much of the experience across Android and iOS.

The screens and everyday product flows could be developed in one codebase. But Prayer Guard quickly took us into the platform-specific parts of mobile development.

We had to think about prayer times, changing prayer windows, background execution, alarms, permissions, usage access, overlays, and the different ways Android devices handle restrictions.

The simple description was: pause some apps during prayer time.

The real implementation was much more complicated.

What happens if the phone restarts? What happens if someone denies a permission? What happens if the operating system stops the app in the background? What happens around midnight? What happens if someone changes their prayer settings?

These details are not visible in a screenshot, but they decide whether a prayer reminder feels reliable.

We did not want to take over the phone

A prayer app should help people, not make them feel trapped.

That is why users choose which apps Prayer Guard protects. Furqanly remains available, and people can snooze or skip when they need to.

If a device does not allow every permission required for app pausing, the experience can still work as a reminder.

That balance mattered to us. We wanted the feature to be strong enough to interrupt mindless scrolling, but gentle enough to remain useful.

Why build another prayer app?

There are already many apps that show prayer times. We were not trying to build another clock with a notification attached.

We wanted to help with the part that happens after the prayer time appears: the moment when the phone is competing for your attention.

Prayer Guard came from a problem we experienced ourselves. That changed how we built it. We cared about the edge cases because we knew what it felt like when a reminder did not behave at the right moment.

Furqanly is still early. We are still improving it and learning from the people who use it.

But it feels worthwhile to build a tool that started with an honest problem in our own lives.

Try Furqanly

Prayer Guard is part of Furqanly, a calm Quran companion available on the web and mobile. Download Furqanly or visit the apps page to see the current platform options.