A prayer app has a good reason to ask where you are: prayer times and the qibla are both functions of your coordinates, and neither can be computed without them. That legitimate need is also what makes the permission easy to abuse — a request for your location looks exactly the same whether the app uses it on the device and forgets it, or uploads it somewhere.
The question worth asking is therefore not whether an app uses your location, but whether it *sends* it anywhere, and to whom. That is answerable, and you do not have to trust anyone's marketing to answer it.
What is actually documented
The reason this question gets asked at all is a specific, reported case. In November 2020, Motherboard (Vice) reported that a data broker called X-Mode had been obtaining location data through software development kits embedded in consumer apps — among them Muslim Pro, one of the most widely used Muslim apps — and reselling access to contractors working with the US military.
Muslim Pro's response at the time was that it had ended its relationship with X-Mode and that it had not knowingly sold data for that purpose. Both Apple and Google subsequently told developers to remove X-Mode's SDK from their apps. That is the documented extent of it, and it is worth being precise: the reporting concerned a data broker's SDK inside apps, not a finding that every Muslim app was selling location data, and it describes a situation from 2020 rather than the state of any app today.
The lasting lesson is structural rather than about one company. An app can be built by people with entirely good intentions and still leak location, because the leak comes from an advertising or analytics SDK that the developer added for revenue and did not fully audit. This is why "do you sell my data" is the wrong question to ask a developer — the honest answer might be no while the third-party code in their app does it anyway.
The five-minute check
You can inspect any app on your phone without special tools. None of this requires trusting a review or a privacy policy's summary.
- Read the store's own data label. On iOS, the App Store listing has an App Privacy section; on Android, Play has a Data Safety section. Both are declarations the developer is required to make, and both distinguish data that is merely used from data that is collected and shared. An app that computes locally can declare no collection at all. If a prayer app's label lists location under 'Data Linked to You' or shares it with third parties, that is the developer telling you so in their own words.
- Check whether it works in airplane mode. Turn off all connectivity and open the app. Prayer times and the qibla are pure arithmetic on your coordinates — an app doing the work on your device will still show them. If the core function breaks without a connection, something is being fetched, and it is fair to ask what is being sent along with the request.
- Look at the permission you granted, not the one asked for. Both platforms let you give approximate rather than precise location, and to grant it only while the app is open. Prayer times need a city, not a street address; a few kilometres of imprecision moves a prayer time by well under a minute. If an app insists on precise, always-on location for prayer times, that is worth a second look.
- Search the privacy policy for the actual list. Skip the introduction and find the section naming third parties or SDKs. Advertising and analytics providers are usually named there. Presence of an ad SDK is not itself wrongdoing — many free apps could not exist otherwise — but it tells you which companies receive something, and you can then read what those companies say they collect.
What computing on the device actually means
Prayer times come from solar geometry: given a latitude, longitude and date, the sun's position is determined, and the times follow from the chosen angles. The qibla is a single trigonometric expression — you can see the whole of it on our how the qibla is calculated page. There is nothing in either calculation that requires a server. A server is only needed if the developer wants one, for their own reasons.
That is the standard worth holding apps to, and it is the one this site holds itself to: the prayer times and qibla pages here run the calculation in your browser, and the coordinates are not transmitted anywhere. Our own app does the same on the device. We would rather you verified that with the checks above than believed it because we wrote it down.
A reasonable position
None of this argues for abandoning apps that use the network. An app that syncs a prayer log across your devices has to send something somewhere, and that can be a perfectly good trade to accept knowingly. The problem is only ever the unknowing version — location leaving your phone for a purpose you would not have agreed to if asked plainly.
So the practical answer to "do prayer apps track your location" is: some have, the documented case is real and specific, most of the risk lives in third-party SDKs rather than in the developer's intent, and you can check any individual app yourself in about five minutes.
Common questions
- Did Muslim Pro sell users' location data to the US military?
- Motherboard reported in November 2020 that data broker X-Mode obtained location data via SDKs embedded in apps including Muslim Pro and resold access to US military contractors. Muslim Pro said it had ended its relationship with X-Mode and had not knowingly sold data for that purpose; Apple and Google then required developers to remove X-Mode's SDK. That is a documented 2020 episode, not a statement about how any app behaves today.
- Can a prayer app work without sending my location anywhere?
- Yes. Prayer times and qibla direction are calculations performed on coordinates — no server is required for either. An app that keeps working correctly in airplane mode is demonstrating exactly that.
- Is precise location needed for accurate prayer times?
- No. Approximate location is enough. Being a kilometre or two off changes prayer times by well under a minute and the qibla bearing by a hundredth of a degree, so granting approximate rather than precise location costs you nothing in accuracy.