Miqa: Always-On Prayer Times

Miqa turns the camera cutout on your phone into a quiet prayer-time ring. A thin ring sits around your front camera and fills slowly as the next prayer comes closer, so you can see how long is left until Asr or Maghrib without opening anything. Beside it, if you like, Miqa shows the name of the prayer and its time or a countdown. It is there on every screen and in every app, and it stays out of your way. In the apps you choose, it steps aside. New in 2.6 Miqa has a new, calmer design. Today shows the Hijri date next to the Gregorian one, and you can move the Hijri date by a day to match the moon sighting where you live. There is a new ring style too: a small sun by day, or the moon in its real phase at night, sits where a clock's hour hand points, so at 10 pm the moon is at 10 o'clock. You can pick a white or a teal app icon, choose from many more towns and cities without any internet, and numbers now appear the way your language writes them. Prayer times Your salah times are worked out on your phone from your location, and Miqa works fully offline. In many countries Miqa now starts with the calculation method that country normally uses, and tells you which one it chose. You can switch to any of fourteen methods, choose Hanafi or Shafi'i Asr, and move any prayer by a few minutes to match your local masjid. The ring can also count down to your masjid's iqamah, and to sunrise after Fajr. In Ramadan the same ring shows you how long is left until Maghrib for iftar, and until Fajr when suhoor ends. Adhan and reminders At prayer time Miqa can play the adhan, or your phone's own alarm sound, if you would like one. It can also remind you a few minutes before each prayer with a soft glow of the ring, a gentle vibration, or both. Make it yours Every colour, size and position can be changed, measured in real millimetres, and a one-minute fine-tune fits the ring to the camera on most phones. Choose the plain ring or the sun and moon, or show only the prayer name, the time or a countdown. There is a light and a dark theme and a larger text option. The ring can sit on your lock screen as well, and setup now offers that on the way in. In your language Whether you say salah, salat or namaz, Miqa speaks your language: thirty-three of them, among them Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, Turkish, Bengali, Persian, Malay, French, Swahili and Tamil. The English is written by us. The other languages are machine translated for now, the app says so openly, and you can report a wrong word with one tap. Private by design Miqa does not have the internet permission at all, so nothing leaves your phone unless you send it yourself. It only uses your approximate location, and only on the phone, or you can simply pick your city. There are no ads, you don't need an account, and nothing you do is tracked. Helping it fit every phone Cameras sit in slightly different places on different phones. After you move the ring, Miqa offers to send a short positioning report from your own email app. It only describes your phone's screen and camera, you can read every line before sending, and it helps the ring sit right on more phones. What Miqa leaves out Miqa does one thing. There is no Qur'an reader, no compass and no news feed, just a calm and honest sign of when the next prayer is. Lock screen ring and Android's accessibility service (optional) Miqa uses the AccessibilityService API for one optional feature only: drawing the ring over your lock screen, when you choose "Over your own wallpaper" for the lock screen in Miqa. Android does not let an ordinary app draw there. The service stays off until you switch it on in Android's accessibility settings, and you can switch it off there at any time. It does not read your screen, see what you type, tap or change anything, or collect any data. Why the permissions "Display over other apps" is what draws the ring. The small silent notification keeps Miqa running on phones that close apps in the background.