Troubleshooting, comparisons and questions that come up often — kept separate from the reference sections so neither turns into a worse copy of the other.
Two mosques in the same city can begin Ramadan a day apart, and neither has made a mistake. The disagreement is old, deliberate, and about method rather than astronomy.
We compared the four Hijri calendars a phone can use, every day of 2026. They never once all agreed — and on some days they give four different dates.
A reminder that arrives ten minutes late, or not at all, has failed at the only job it had. Here is what is actually swallowing it, in the order worth checking.
The instruction is to begin at seven. What that looks like in practice — and what tends to backfire — is rarely written down.
From London, being one degree off puts you 84 km wide of Mecca — and the Kaaba itself is only 0.0002° across. Which is precisely why the classical answer is not what people assume.
Some have. Here is what is actually known, and a five-minute check you can run on any app on your phone rather than taking anyone's word for it.
Five things that actually distinguish one prayer app from another — and the one that matters far more the further north you live.
A spinning or stuck qibla needle is almost never the app's arithmetic. It is one of four things, and three of them you can fix where you are standing.