Before you trust a Quran app, it is worth asking where its Quran text comes from, whether it makes you create an account, what it sends off your phone, whether it carries adverts or trackers, what it does when it is not sure of something, and whether it gives you a way to check its claims. A trustworthy app will give clear answers to all six, in plain words that you can find without searching, and its answers will match what you can see on its store page and in your phone’s settings.
None of these questions needs any technical knowledge to ask, and together they say a great deal about how an app treats both the Quran and the person reading it. We go through them one at a time below, and at the end we explain how we answer them for our own apps.
Where does the Quran text come from?
This is the first question because it matters most. The Quran text in an app should be copied from an established and checked source, and the app should tell you which source and which version it uses, usually on its About screen or in its credits.
Be cautious of any app that cannot tell you where its text comes from, or that says only that it was “prepared by the team” with no further detail. Typing the Quran by hand invites small errors, and those errors may go unnoticed for years.
The question has become more important with the arrival of AI. AI systems that generate text can produce words that look like Quran but are not, and they can do so with complete confidence. Our own research into gaps in Quran technology lists AI misquoting among the trust problems that remain unsolved. A safe app never lets a machine write Quran text. If it uses AI at all, the AI should only help to find a place in a trusted text, and every word you read should be copied from the source.
Does it need an account?
Reading or listening to the Quran should never require you to sign up. An account means the app holds information about you on a server somewhere, such as an email address, a name, or a record of what you have read and when.
Some features may seem to need an account, such as keeping your bookmarks across two devices. That can be a fair reason to offer one, but it should always be optional, and the app should work fully without it. If an app asks you to create an account before you can open a single page, ask yourself why it needs to know who you are.
What does it send off your phone?
A Quran app does not need to send much, if anything, off your phone. Your bookmarks, your reading position, your recordings and your location can all stay on the device, and they should leave it only when you choose to share or save them somewhere.
On Android you can look at the permissions an app asks for on its store page and in your settings. The internet permission is the one to watch. An app without it has no way of sending anything off your phone, because the phone itself prevents it. An app with it may still behave well, but you are then relying on its word and not on the phone, so read its privacy policy with that in mind.
Look also for clear answers about location. A prayer times feature may need to know roughly where you are, but a well-built app can use that on the phone and keep it there, with no need to send it to anyone. We explain how this works in our article on prayer times without the internet, and our article on on-device AI for Quran recitation applies the same principle to recordings of recitation.
Does it carry ads or trackers?
Adverts in a Quran app are more than an inconvenience. When we read thousands of low-star reviews of Quran and Islamic apps, advertising was the largest complaint by a clear margin, and some reviewers described adverts appearing while they were reading or listening. We set that study out in our article on what Quran app reviews tell us.
Trackers are harder to see than adverts. These are pieces of code from other companies, built into an app to measure how it is used or to build a picture of the person using it. An app’s privacy policy and its store page should tell you whether it contains analytics or tracking code, and an app that has none will usually say so.
A useful sign is whether the app makes a firm commitment that there will be no adverts in future as well as today. Some of the reviews we read came from people who had used an app for a long time and left once the adverts became too frequent.
What does it do when it is not sure?
Any app that listens to recitation, recognises a passage or answers a question will sometimes be uncertain. What matters is whether it tells you.
A trustworthy app shows how confident it is, and when it does not know, it says so or shows nothing at all. It should never present a guess as a certainty, particularly where the Quran is concerned, because a wrong answer stated with confidence is worse than no answer. If an app always seems completely sure of itself, however poor the recording or however unusual the question, treat that as a warning.
Can you check its claims yourself?
The final question is whether the app gives you any way to confirm what it says. That might be as simple as naming its sources so that you can look them up, listing its permissions honestly, or publishing the method it uses to check its own text.
An app that invites you to check it is showing confidence in its own honesty. An app that asks you to take everything on trust is asking for more than it has earned. Our research found that very few people working with Quran text publish any way for a stranger to check what they are given, and we would like to see that change across the whole field.
How we answer these for our own apps
We hold our own apps to these six questions, and we are writing them down as a promise covering our Quran apps. In short, it commits to no adverts, ever; to keeping what you do on your phone unless you choose to share it; to never requiring an account; to asking only for the permissions an app needs and saying why; to never typing the Quran or letting a machine make it; to telling you first if anything ever goes online, with any online part left switched off until you turn it on; and to letting you check us. That promise is still a draft, and we will publish it in full, along with a check of each app against it, once it is ready.
As for where our apps stand today, Mirtal, our recitation app, is in closed testing. It takes its Quran text from Tanzil and never types or generates any of it, it shows how confident it is in what it finds, and it asks for no internet permission, with no account, no adverts and no analytics.
Miqa, our prayer times app, is live on Google Play. It also asks for no internet permission, and it has no accounts, no adverts, no analytics and no tracking. Your approximate location stays on the phone, and its settings are left out of cloud backup.
Our privacy page covers how information is handled across our apps and this website. If you put these six questions to one of our apps and find an answer that does not hold, we would be grateful to hear about it through our contact page.