HSM Software Refqa

Refqa

Privacy Policy

Last updated 20 August 2026

The short version

Refqa has no user accounts, no sign-in, and no server of its own. It does not build a profile of you, does not show ads, and contains no advertising or analytics trackers.

One thing does leave your device, and you should know about it: your location is sent to the prayer-times service (AlAdhan) to calculate accurate times for where you are. You are told this, in the app, before it ever asks for the permission.

Your voice is only ever sent anywhere if you explicitly say yes. The recitation check runs on your device by default; on phones that cannot do that, the app asks — once, in plain words — whether you want to use Google's speech service instead, and you can change that answer at any time in Settings.

If the app crashes, a technical report of the failure is sent to our error tracker (Sentry) so it can be fixed. Your location is stripped out of those reports before they leave the device, and they carry no identifier for you.

Everything else — your bookmarks, streaks, dhikr counts, and settings — stays on your phone.

Who we are

Refqa is an Islamic companion app offering prayer times, qibla direction, the Qur'an, Hadith, du'as, dhikr counting, and recitation practice.

Contact: hussein.mohamed.software@gmail.com

No accounts, no backend

Refqa has no registration, no login, and no Refqa-operated server. We do not have a database of users, because there are no users to have. Nothing you do in the app is associated with an identity, because the app never establishes one.

Location

What: Your device's approximate or precise coordinates (latitude and longitude), and altitude where your device reports it.

Why: To calculate prayer times for your position and to point the qibla compass toward the Kaaba. Both are meaningless without knowing where you are.

When: Only while you are using a feature that needs it — the prayer times screen or the qibla compass. Refqa does not track your location in the background, and does not request "always" location access.

Stored? No. Your coordinates are used to make the calculation and then discarded; they are never written to your device's storage. What is saved on your device is the resulting prayer timetable — the times themselves — so the app still works offline. The prayer-times service echoes your coordinates back in its reply, and Refqa removes them before saving that reply, which an automated test enforces. A saved timetable does imply a general area, but your coordinates themselves are not kept.

Shared? Yes — with one service. Your latitude and longitude are sent to the AlAdhan prayer-times API (api.aladhan.com) with each request, because that is how the service calculates times for your position. AlAdhan is operated by a third party under its own privacy policy — see https://aladhan.com/privacy-policy. Your coordinates are not sent to anyone else.

When your device is offline, or the service is unreachable, Refqa calculates prayer times entirely on your device and your location is not transmitted at all.

Your control: Location permission is optional and requested only when you first open a feature that needs it. You can decline or revoke it in your device settings at any time. If you do, prayer times and qibla will not work, but the rest of the app is unaffected.

Microphone and speech recognition (تسميع)

What: Audio from your microphone, while you are actively recording a recitation in the Tasmee (recitation-check) feature.

Why: To transcribe what you recited so it can be compared against the text of the verse and marked correct or incorrect.

When: Only while you have deliberately started listening by tapping the microphone button on that screen. The microphone is not accessed anywhere else in the app, and never in the background.

Shared? Only if you have explicitly allowed it. By default, no.

Refqa does not perform speech recognition itself; it asks your operating system's built-in recognizer to do it. Every attempt is made in on-device mode first, which keeps the audio on your phone.

Many phones cannot recognise Arabic on-device — the attempt simply fails. When that happens, Refqa asks you, in a dialog, whether it may instead send that recording to Google's speech service to transcribe it. The dialog says so in those words. If you decline, nothing is sent and the feature reports that it is unavailable on your device. If you allow it, the recording is sent — and only then — for that attempt and future ones.

Your control: the answer is remembered and is fully revocable at Settings › Recitation check mode, which offers three choices:

Microphone permission is separate, optional, and requested only when you first use Tasmee. Decline it and every other part of the app works normally.

Stored? No. The audio is never recorded to a file and never saved by Refqa, and only the resulting text is held briefly in memory to grade the verse, then discarded when you leave the screen. Where you have allowed online checking, what Google does with the audio it receives is governed by Google's own privacy policy, not this one.

Notifications

Refqa sends you the adhan at prayer times, optional salawat reminders, and an optional streak reminder.

All notifications are generated locally on your device. Refqa has no push notification service: there is no Firebase Cloud Messaging, no push token, and no server that can send you anything. Your device schedules them from times it calculated itself, and they work with no internet connection.

Refqa uses exact alarms so the adhan sounds at the true prayer time rather than being delayed by battery optimisation. This is a scheduling permission; it collects nothing.

Notification permission is optional and revocable in your device settings.

Crash reporting

Refqa uses Sentry (https://sentry.io) to report crashes and errors so they can be fixed. What is sent is a technical description of the failure: the error, a stack trace, and device/OS details such as model, OS version, and app version.

Deliberately not sent:

Routine network failures (being offline, a timeout) are not reported at all.

Sentry processes this data on our behalf under its own privacy policy — https://sentry.io/privacy/.

Update and maintenance checks

Refqa asks Google's Firebase Remote Config one question when it starts: is this version still supported, and is the app currently available? That is what lets a critical fix be made mandatory, and lets the app be paused if something is seriously wrong with it.

The request carries no account, no location, and nothing you have done in the app. Like any internet request it reveals your IP address, and Firebase gives the installation a random identifier so the request can be answered. Three things are worth stating plainly:

Firebase processes this under Google's own privacy policy — https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy.

What is stored on your device

All of this stays on your phone, is never uploaded, and is not visible to us:

Deleting it: Uninstalling Refqa deletes all of it permanently. There is no copy anywhere else, so there is nothing for you to request from us and nothing for us to delete on your behalf.

Third-party services Refqa contacts

Refqa fetches content from these services. As with any internet request, each necessarily sees your IP address and the content you requested. Only AlAdhan receives your coordinates.

Service Purpose Receives your location?
AlAdhan (api.aladhan.com) Prayer times, qibla, hijri dates Yes
AlQuran.cloud (api.alquran.cloud) Qur'an text and verse audio No
MP3Quran (mp3quran.net) Reciter catalogue and audio No
Qurango (backup.qurango.net) Live radio station audio No
RadioJar (stream.radiojar.com) Live radio station audio No
quran.com (api.quran.com) Tafsir and verse text No
jsDelivr (cdn.jsdelivr.net) Hadith collections No
Sunnah.com (api.sunnah.com) Hadith (when configured) No
Google / Apple speech services Recitation transcription — only after on-device recognition fails and you allow it No (receives the recording, not your location)
Sentry (sentry.io) Crash and error reports No (stripped)
Firebase Remote Config (firebaseremoteconfig.googleapis.com) Update and maintenance checks No

Advertising and analytics

Refqa contains no advertising and no analytics or tracking SDKs. We do not measure your usage, do not build a profile, and do not sell or share data with anyone for advertising. There is no data broker relationship of any kind.

Firebase Remote Config, described above, is a configuration service and not an analytics one: the Firebase project is created with Google Analytics switched off, and no measurement SDK is bundled with the app.

Children

Refqa is suitable for all ages and is not directed at children specifically. It does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age, because it does not collect personal information at all.

Your rights

Because Refqa holds no personal data on any server, most data-protection rights (access, correction, deletion, portability) have nothing to act on. Your data is already, and only, in your hands: it is on your device, and uninstalling the app erases it.

For data held by the third parties listed above, contact them directly under their own policies.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the updated version will be published here with a new "last updated" date, at its permanent home: https://husseinmohamed99.github.io/privacy/refqa/

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about your data, go to hussein.mohamed.software@gmail.com.

HSM Software

This page mirrors the privacy policy bundled inside the app under Settings → Privacy, which is rendered from the same source text.

All HSM Software privacy policies · Portfolio