Ihtida — Privacy Policy

🟢 The short version: Ihtida has no accounts, no analytics, and no trackers. Your name, your progress, your prayer history and your Shahada date are stored only on your iPhone — we never receive them. The one thing that leaves your device is your location, sent to a prayer-times service so the app can tell you when to pray. We make money from optional subscriptions, never from your data.

1. Information We Collect

We collect nothing on our servers. Ihtida has no backend.

There is no account to create, no sign-in, no email address to hand over, and no profile stored anywhere we can reach. We — the developers of Ihtida — cannot see who you are, that you use the app, or anything you do inside it.

The app does ask you for a first name during onboarding, purely so it can greet you warmly. That name is written to your device's local storage and never transmitted anywhere. If you would rather not give one, you can leave it blank or enter anything you like.

✅ No account. No email. No profile. Nothing about you sits on a server we control.

2. What Is Stored On Your Device

Everything the app remembers about your journey is kept locally on your iPhone, in Apple's standard app storage, and never leaves it. That includes:

  • The first name you entered and your chosen learning path
  • Lesson, module and quiz progress, bookmarks and knowledge-check scores
  • Your streak history and earned achievement badges
  • Your Shahada (revert) date and your position in the 30-day journey, if you set them
  • Tasbeeh and dhikr counts, custom dhikr lists and daily goals
  • Quran practice and memorization progress
  • Missed-prayer (qada) counts you choose to track
  • Prayer calculation preferences, and a short-lived cache of recently fetched prayer times
  • Whether you have unlocked Ihtida Pro

This data is private to the app, is included in your iCloud Backup only if you have iCloud Backup switched on in iOS (a setting you control entirely through your Apple account), and is permanently deleted when you delete Ihtida from your device.

3. Location

This is the only category of information that ever leaves your phone, so it deserves a plain explanation.

Ihtida asks for your location only while you are using the app, and only to do three things:

  1. Calculate your prayer times. Your latitude and longitude are sent to the AlAdhan API, an established Islamic prayer-times service, which returns the five daily prayer times for that position. Along with your coordinates the request includes your chosen calculation method and Asr madhhab — nothing else. No name, no device identifier, no account, because the app has none of those to send.
  2. Point you toward the Qibla. The Qibla compass calculates the direction of the Kaaba entirely on your device using your position and your phone's compass. Nothing is transmitted for this.
  3. Find nearby mosques. When you open the Mosque Finder, the app asks Apple's Maps service for places matching "mosque" or "masjid" near the map area you are viewing. This search is handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy — Ihtida operates no mosque database and no server of its own.

We never store your location. It is used in the moment, held in memory, and discarded. We keep no location history, and because we have no server and no account system, there is no place for one to accumulate.

Location is entirely optional. You can decline it, and the app is built to stay useful without it: prayer times can be set manually, and every other feature works normally. You can revoke access at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Ihtida, and the app will show an honest prompt rather than silently failing.

4. Third-Party Services

Ihtida links no third-party SDKs whatsoever — the app contains zero external packages. It communicates with exactly three outside services:

  • AlAdhan API — receives your coordinates and prayer-calculation preferences to return prayer times (Section 3)
  • Apple MapKit — receives your map region when you use the Mosque Finder (Section 3)
  • Apple StoreKit — processes Ihtida Pro purchases (Section 6)

We do not use Google Analytics, Firebase, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, TelemetryDeck, Sentry, Crashlytics, the Meta/Facebook SDK, or any advertising or attribution network. There is no analytics or crash-reporting code in the app at all.

Ihtida also contains ordinary outbound links — to scholarly sources such as Tanzil, Al Quran Cloud, EveryAyah and Sunnah.com in its content credits, and to the App Store. Following one of these opens Safari or the App Store, at which point that destination's own privacy policy applies.

✅ No ad networks. No trackers. No analytics. Nothing sold to anyone, ever.

5. Notifications

Ihtida can remind you when a prayer time arrives. These reminders are:

  • Scheduled entirely on your device using Apple's local notification system
  • Never routed through a push-notification server, ours or anyone else's — the app registers for no remote push at all
  • Completely optional, and adjustable in the app's Settings or in iOS Settings
  • Never used for advertising or third-party content

6. Purchases

Ihtida Pro is an optional subscription (monthly or annual) or a one-time lifetime purchase. Every transaction is processed by Apple through StoreKit. We never receive or store your payment card, billing address, or personal details — Apple handles all of it, and only tells the app whether an entitlement is active.

Core worship is deliberately never behind the paywall: wudu, the full prayer guide with recitation, prayer times, Qibla, tasbeeh and the salah surahs are free for everyone, permanently. Pro unlocks depth and comfort features only.

You can manage or cancel a subscription any time at apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions.

7. Religious Information

Ihtida is an Islamic app, and we recognise that information about a person's faith is sensitive — it is treated as a special category of personal data under the GDPR and comparable laws.

We have designed the app so that this data is never ours to hold. Your Shahada date, your prayer and worship activity, your learning progress and your religious questions all remain on your device and are never transmitted to us or to anyone else. We hold no record that you are Muslim, that you are considering Islam, or that you use this app.

The single exception is described honestly in Section 3: a request for prayer times reveals a set of coordinates to the AlAdhan service. It carries no identity — no name, no account, no device identifier — but it is a request for Islamic prayer times, and we would rather state that plainly than imply the app is entirely offline.

8. Children's Privacy

Ihtida is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Because the app collects no personal information from anyone and operates no server, there is no data about a younger user for us to hold or misuse. Parents or guardians with questions are welcome to contact us.

9. Your Rights

Because we hold no personal data about you on any server, there is nothing on our side to export, correct, or delete. Your information lives on your device and you control all of it:

  • Delete everything: delete the Ihtida app from your iPhone; all local data goes with it
  • Revoke location: iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Ihtida
  • Turn off reminders: iOS Settings → Notifications → Ihtida, or the app's own Settings screen
  • Manage your subscription: through your Apple ID subscription settings

If you live in the EU/EEA (GDPR), the United Kingdom (UK GDPR), or California (CCPA/CPRA), the above reflects full compliance: we perform no processing of personal data on our own infrastructure, we sell no data, we share no data for advertising, and we operate no profiling or automated decision-making.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. We will never begin collecting personal data, add analytics, or introduce trackers without updating this policy first and saying so clearly.

11. Contact Us

Questions about this policy, or about how Ihtida handles your information?

Email: hi@javidlone.com

We aim to respond within a few days.