About ZohaNur
The intention behind the project, what it refuses to do, and the honest limits of a one-person effort.
ZohaNur is an Islamic companion application for daily worship. It began because the tools available were either good software with careless religious content, or careful religious content wrapped in software that harvested the user.
The intention#
The free core of the project is built with the intention of sadaqah jariyah — work that keeps benefiting people long after the person who built it has stopped working on it. That intention is not decoration. It decides the design.
ZohaNur is also, plainly, an independent developer's business: optional premium features are sold through Google Play, and that revenue is what sustains the project and its developer. The two sit together honestly — the essentials of worship are free for everyone forever, and those who want more can pay for more. What the intention rules out is different: advertising, tracking, engagement loops, and any design that needs to know who you are. The app has none of those, and it will not acquire them.
What ZohaNur will not do#
These are commitments, not current settings.
- No advertising, ever. Not banners, not sponsored content, not "partners".
- No tracking or analytics. We do not know how many surahs you read, and we have arranged things so that we cannot find out.
- The core is free forever. The Quran, hadith collections, prayer times, qibla, adhkar and every essential of daily worship are free for everyone and will never move behind a paywall. Optional premium features exist and support the project; worship never requires them. What is free and what is paid →
- No engagement design. No streak guilt, no notifications engineered to pull you back in, no gamification of worship. Reminders exist because you asked for them, and they can all be switched off.
- No account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to leak.
What ZohaNur is careful about#
Software that carries religious content has a different duty than software that carries a shopping cart. A layout bug wastes a moment. A mistranslated verse, a fabricated narration presented as sound, or a fiqh ruling stated with more confidence than its evidence supports can mislead someone in their worship.
So the standard the project holds itself to is: show the source. Where a narration appears, its collection and grading appear with it. Where scholars differ, the difference is stated rather than flattened into one answer. Where the app cannot decide something for you — a moon sighting, a zakat ruling on an unusual asset, a matter needing a scholar — it says so instead of guessing.
The ZohaNur AI assistant is the sharpest example: it is a language model, it is capable of being confidently wrong about religion, and the app says this in plain words rather than in a footnote.
The honest limits#
- It is one developer. Replies take time; features take longer.
- The apps are Android-only for now. iOS is on the roadmap but not close.
- Translations beyond English are incomplete. Tamil content exists and is being filled in; other languages are further out.
- This reference library is being written page by page. Some links still land on a page saying so. That is deliberate — an honest "not written yet" is better than filler that looks authoritative.