NamazNearby
NamazNearby helps you find mosques near you and the times they actually hold jama‘ah. This page explains exactly what that involves — what stays on your phone, what reaches a server, and what we never collect at all.
The short version
- There are no accounts. You are never asked for a name, phone number or email to use the app.
- Your location is used to find mosques and draw routes. It is never stored in our database.
- Bookmarks and prayer reminders stay on your phone. No server knows which mosque you pray at.
- There is no advertising, no analytics and no tracking of any kind in the app.
- We do not sell or share personal information, because we do not hold any to sell.
1. Who this covers
This policy covers the NamazNearby mobile app for iOS and Android, and this website. Where it says “we”, that means the team that publishes NamazNearby.
2. No account, and the anonymous id
The app has no sign-up and no sign-in screen. It does, however, need a way to attribute contributions, so that a mosque added by mistake can be traced to the device that added it and corrected.
On first launch, the app asks our backend for an anonymous session id — a random identifier tied to no personal detail whatsoever. It is stored on your device and attached to any mosque or prayer time you contribute. It is not linked to your name, email, phone number, advertising id or device id, and it is not used to build a profile of you.
Deleting the app deletes that id. A reinstall receives a completely new one and cannot be connected to the old one.
3. Location
The app asks for location permission because the entire product is “what is near me”. You may decline and still browse — the app says so on its first screen.
Your coordinates are used, at the moment you use a feature, to:
- find mosques within a radius of you and sort them by distance;
- calculate adhan times for your position, when a mosque has no community times recorded;
- draw a walking or driving route to a mosque you chose;
- fill in an address automatically when you register a new mosque.
Your location is never written to our database and never associated with your anonymous id. It is sent with a request, used to answer it, and not retained by us. The app does not track your location in the background — it reads a position only while you have the app open.
4. What stays on your phone
The following never leaves your device, and we cannot see any of it:
- Bookmarks — the mosques you save, including their names and addresses.
- Prayer reminders — which mosque you asked to be reminded about, and when. These are scheduled by your phone's own alarm system. No server is involved and none is told which mosque you chose.
- Your language choice and whether you have seen the intro.
- The anonymous session id described above.
5. What we store on our servers
We keep only what the app cannot work without:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Mosques you add | Name, address and location of the mosque — public information about a public place. Stamped with the anonymous id of the device that added it, so mistakes can be corrected. |
| Iqamah times you add | The jama‘ah times for a mosque, so everyone nearby can see them. Also stamped with the anonymous id. |
| Eid times you add | The date and time a mosque announced for its Eid jama‘ah. |
| iOS waiting list email | Only if you type it into the form on this website. Used once, to tell you the iPhone app is out. See section 8. |
Note what is not in that list: no location history, no search history, no list of mosques you looked at, no device identifiers, no contacts, no photos.
6. Services the app talks to
Answering “which mosque, and when” means asking a few outside services. Each receives only what it needs for that request. As with any internet request, the service on the other end can see your device's IP address — that is how the internet works, and it is not something we can switch off on your behalf.
| Service | What it receives | What for |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Your coordinates with a search; contributions you make; the anonymous id | Our database and backend hosting |
| Google Maps | The map area you are viewing | Drawing the map |
| Google Routes | Your position and the mosque's | Walking and driving directions |
| Aladhan | Your approximate coordinates | Calculated adhan times for your position |
| OpenStreetMap (Nominatim, Overpass) | A map position | Finding mosques and looking up an address when registering one |
These are ordinary service providers, not advertising partners. We do not pass them anything about you as a person, because we do not have anything.
7. Notifications
If you turn on a reminder for a bookmarked mosque, your phone schedules a local notification before that mosque's jama‘ah. There are no push notifications, no push tokens and no server that could send you anything. Turning reminders off, or removing the bookmark, cancels the schedule immediately.
8. The iOS waiting list
The iPhone app is not out yet. If you enter your email address in the waiting-list form on this website, we store that address and nothing else — no name, no IP logged against it, no marketing profile.
It is used for exactly one message: that NamazNearby is available on the App Store. It is not added to a newsletter, not shared, and not sold. The list is stored so that it cannot be read from the website itself — only by us, directly. Ask us and we will remove your address; see section 12.
9. What we deliberately do not do
- No advertising, and no ad networks or ad identifiers.
- No analytics or crash-reporting SDK. We do not measure which screens you open.
- No tracking across other apps or websites, and no data broker relationships.
- No selling or sharing of personal information — as those terms are used in laws such as the CCPA — because none is collected.
- No access to contacts, photos, microphone, camera or calendar. The app never asks, because it never needs to.
10. Children
NamazNearby is suitable for all ages and is not directed at children specifically. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age, beyond what is described above.
11. How long things are kept
- Contributed mosque and prayer times stay as long as they are useful to the community — they describe a public place, not a person.
- Location is not retained at all.
- Waiting-list emails are deleted once the iPhone app has launched and the announcement has gone out, or sooner if you ask.
- Everything on your phone is removed when you uninstall the app.
12. Your choices and your rights
- Location: revoke permission any time in your phone's settings. The app keeps working, without the “near me” part.
- Reminders: turn off notification permission, or the reminder itself, in the app.
- Everything local: uninstalling the app erases your bookmarks, reminders and anonymous id.
- Waiting list: email us and your address is deleted.
- Contributions: mosque and prayer times are community data and stay visible, but they contain nothing personal about you. If you believe something you added should be removed, write to us.
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal information we hold about you, or to object to its use. Since the only personal information we ever hold is a waiting-list email address, those requests are usually answered the same day. Contact us at the address below.
13. Changes to this policy
If the app starts doing something this page does not describe, this page changes first. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version.
14. Contact
Questions about this policy, or a request about your information:
REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_EMAIL
REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_EMAIL above with a real, monitored address
(App Store review rejects a policy with no working contact), and add your legal or
trading entity name in section 1 if you have one. This document describes what the
code actually does as of the effective date; it has not been reviewed by a lawyer,
so if you operate in the EU or California it is worth having someone check it
against GDPR and CCPA wording before launch.