The short version: prayer times, qibla and the masjid check are computed on your device, and no coordinate is transmitted for those. Finding masajid near you, showing a masjid’s iqama, and answering “can I make it?” ask our masjid record and your maps provider, and those requests carry a location; the weather on the Home screen sends it to our weather provider. A broadcast carries the masjid’s position, not yours. Outside the masjid the microphone is deaf. Inside the masjid but outside the prayer window it is deaf. It is not always listening. Turning Masjid Mode on is the consent and turning it off ends the broadcast — and on the automatic setting the phone opens the microphone by itself, inside a masjid, at the iqama, and never while the phone moves at driving speed. A broadcast you make is recorded, when recording is on, and published to the «مئذنة» shelf inside the app, where other people can play it. There are no accounts, no ads, no tracking, and nothing is ever sold. The app is free, for everyone.
1. Location — what is computed on your phone, and what is sent
Live Athan computes three things from your location on the phone itself, and asks a server for four more:
- Prayer times. The app calculates prayer times with precise astronomy directly on your device. No account, no server — it works even offline and in flight. Your coordinates are not transmitted to any server for this.
- Qibla direction. The compass calculation also happens entirely on the device.
- The masjid check for Masjid Mode. If you enable Masjid Mode (broadcasting), the app checks — on the device — whether you are inside a masjid, during a prayer window. That check never leaves your phone: no coordinate is transmitted by that path. A broadcast carries the masjid’s name and the masjid’s position, not yours, so listeners can see where they are listening to. If you never enable Masjid Mode, background location is not requested at all.
- Finding masajid, a masjid’s iqama, “can I make it?”, and the weather. These four ask a server, and the request carries a location: the list of masajid near you, and a search for a place you are not standing in, send your position to our masjid record; a masjid’s iqama times come from that record, labelled with where they came from; “can I make it?” asks your maps provider for an estimated travel time; and the weather on the Home screen sends your position to our weather provider. If you do not use these, nothing is asked for them.
2. Microphone — what opens it, and when
Your phone is not always listening. Outside the masjid the microphone is deaf. Inside the masjid but outside the prayer window it is deaf. It can be used by Live Athan in exactly three situations:
- Masjid Mode (broadcasting). Masjid Mode is off until you turn it on, and turning the switch on is the consent — your phone asks for the microphone once, and nothing else is asked of you. You turn it on once; you do not start each session. On the automatic setting the microphone can open only when two things are both true: you are inside a masjid, and it is a prayer window — and inside those two, it opens by itself (see the note below). Before a broadcast starts, the sound is recognised by the phone’s own speech recogniser where the phone has one, and otherwise by Apple’s speech service; our servers receive sound only during a broadcast. Audio is sent to our relay server only while a broadcast is running, and a visible indicator shows the broadcast state the whole time. Turn the switch off and the broadcast ends; on the automatic setting it also ends when you leave the masjid. You can also start a broadcast by hand: then it runs because you started it, and it runs until you end it.
- Record Athan. If you record your own athan, the recording is kept on your device. It is only uploaded if you explicitly choose to share it.
- Ask by voice, in the car. The microphone opens for your question only when you ask, and your words go to our servers with no identifier so the question can be answered.
The microphone can open without your hand. You turn Masjid Mode on once — that is the consent — and after that, on the automatic setting, the phone opens the microphone by itself inside a masjid, at the iqama of a prayer, with nothing pressed. On iPhone and on Android alike, with Masjid Mode on the automatic setting the microphone opens by itself inside a masjid at prayer time. It never opens while the phone is moving at driving speed. On Android, for as long as Masjid Mode is on, a permanent notice on the phone states plainly whether the microphone is open or closed — it is closed until the moment a prayer begins at the masjid. If you do not want the microphone to open by itself: turn Masjid Mode off, or use the manual setting, where nothing opens until you press Start.
Broadcast audio is public by nature. The point of broadcasting is that others can listen. While you broadcast, the audio is relayed live to listeners. When the broadcast ends, transmission stops.
A broadcast is recorded, and the recording is published. With the Record switch on, a broadcast you make is recorded on our side and shelved in «مئذنة» inside the app, where anyone — strangers included — can find it and play it, on the phone and on the television. What is kept is the same audio the listeners heard, from the moment the broadcast starts until it ends. You own your own recording: you can play it, share it, and remove it from the shelf, from the phone or from the television, with a window to undo. Removing it takes it off the shelf; the file itself stays on our servers. With the Record switch off, nothing is kept. How long a recording stays on the shelf depends on what it is — a daily prayer is kept about a week, repeated athans and iqamas are cleared so that only the clearest few voices remain, and a khutbah or a dars is kept indefinitely, as knowledge.
What a listener should not assume. A live broadcast is one person’s phone inside a masjid. Live Athan does not verify that whoever is broadcasting speaks for that masjid, or that the masjid knows or approves of it — so what you hear is audio from that place, not a statement by that masjid. If a broadcast is not what it claims to be, the listening screen has a flag to report it, and you can hide that masjid from your live list.
3. Camera — only when you choose it
When you broadcast you may choose Audio + Video, so that listeners see the mihrab and the minbar. The picture is sent only while that broadcast runs, and it is kept with the recording when recording is on. The camera is also used, on your phone, for the Qibla finder, and when you photograph a masjid’s iqamah board or scan a boarding pass. The camera never opens by itself.
4. Two promises we have withdrawn
Two things this page and our other material used to say are no longer true, so we are withdrawing them rather than leaving them standing. First: we said that conversation between the phases of a prayer — the talk in the gaps between the athan, the iqama, the salat — is never stored or transmitted, because it is filtered out in real time. That filtering is off. While you are broadcasting from inside the masjid, the microphone stays open from the moment it starts until you end it: whatever is said in the room during that time is carried live to the listeners, and the recording that is kept is the same audio the listeners heard. If something should not leave the room, end the broadcast. Second: we said you accept Masjid Mode through a licence-agreement step when you install the app. That step was written into an early design and never built, and there is no such step today. The switch is the consent: Masjid Mode is off until you turn it on, your phone asks for the microphone once, and turning it off ends the broadcast.
5. The anonymous identifier
Live Athan has no accounts and no sign-up. So that the app's own services can work without knowing who you are, it generates one random identifier when it is first installed. It is a random string — it contains no personal information and is not linked to your email, contacts, or location. One exception you choose yourself: if you give a display name with an athan you publish, that name is stored with this identifier. We cannot use it to identify you, and we do not try.
6. What we do NOT do
- No advertising — the app contains no ads and no advertising SDKs.
- No sale or sharing of data with data brokers or advertisers. Ever.
- No tracking across other apps or websites.
- No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDKs.
- No accounts, no passwords, no contact lists, no personal profiles.
Section 1 is the whole of what the app does with your location. There is no map, count or ranking of where people pray in Live Athan: no such thing is built today, and this page is where any change to that would be written.
7. Optional diagnostics — off by default
The app can send an anonymous health report (device model, system version, and which internal services are healthy) to help us catch bugs across many devices. This is off by default, contains no identifier and no personal data, and only runs if you turn it on in Settings.
8. No money anywhere in the app
Live Athan has no money surface of any kind — nothing to pay, nothing to buy, no lending, no giving — and it collects no financial information. Qardon is a separate service on its own site, with its own privacy policy; the app does not open it.
9. Children
Live Athan does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children. There are no accounts and no profiles to create.
10. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, we will update this page and the date at the top. Because the app collects so little, we expect changes to be rare.
11. Contact
Questions about privacy? Email support@fotohinc.com — every message is read and answered.