I started building Quran Mode in March 2026, a few weeks into Ramadan. I wasn't planning to ship a product. I was planning to fix something embarrassing about my own day.
Here's the embarrassing part. I'd hear the adhan, put my phone face-down, get up to make wudu, and then — somewhere between the bathroom and the prayer mat — I'd glance at the screen. A notification, a thumbnail, a tweet. Twenty minutes later I'd still be on the couch, scrolling, with the prayer time slipping away.
It was a shape I'd watched in myself for years. I knew the problem. I'd read the studies. I'd also read the verse everyone quotes when this comes up:
“So woe to those who pray, who are heedless of their prayer.”
— Surah Al-Maʿun, 107:4–5
Heedless. That word stuck. I wasn't skipping prayers. I was showing up to them late, still half-living in someone else's feed.
The thing that didn't work
I tried what most people try first. Move social apps off the home screen. Black-and-white phone mode. Screen Time daily limits. They worked for about four days each.
The problem with all those tools is that they don't care when you open Instagram. They just care how much you open it in a 24-hour window. So you can blow your entire 30-minute Instagram budget at 5:30am and still be heedless at Maghrib. The unit of intervention is the day, but the unit that actually matters is the prayer.
The realisation
At some point during Ramadan I noticed that the iOS Screen Time framework had been quietly upgraded over the years. There's a set of APIs Apple opened to third-party developers — the Family Controls and Managed Settings frameworks — that let an app block any app the user chooses, on a schedule the user chooses, with all the work happening on-device. No remote server has to know what apps you have.
That was the missing piece. You could anchor the block to prayer windows. Not the whole day. Not arbitrary timers. Just the 30-or-so minutes around each adhan, where the cost of one swipe is actually a missed sunnah.
I built the first version of Quran Mode in two weeks. It blocked Instagram and TikTok between Maghrib and Isha on my own phone. It worked the first night. I prayed on time. I finished the rakat without wondering what was on Twitter. I went to bed without scrolling. That was enough proof of concept for me.
What Quran Mode actually does
The app does four things. None of them are revolutionary on their own:
- Blocks the apps you chooseduring your prayer windows, using Apple's Family Controls API. You pick the apps. You pick the windows. The system enforces it.
- Tracks all five daily prayers, builds streaks, and shows you a quiet weekly view of where you're consistent and where you slip.
- Includes the things you'd otherwise grab a separate app for— the full Quran with all 114 surahs, a Qibla compass, a digital tasbih, duas, and adhkar. So you're not juggling six tabs.
- Stays out of your data. No account. No tracking. No ads. Your prayer history lives on the device. I built the privacy model around the assumption that anyone using a religious app deserves the same baseline as a banking app, not a free-tier social network.
What it doesn't do
Worth being clear, since I get this email regularly:
- It can't force you to pray. Nothing can. It just removes one specific failure mode — the one where you intended to pray, but a feed got in the way.
- It's iOS only.Android has different APIs and fewer protections around app blocking. I'd rather ship something that actually works on iPhone than ship something flaky on both.
- It's not a replacement for a teacher. The Quran reader is for reading; for tafsir and rulings, please find a local scholar.
A note on copies
Since launch I've seen a couple of websites pop up using the same name. To be clear: the official Quran Mode iOS app is published under App Store ID 6759002468 and the only official website is quran-mode.app. If you're unsure, the App Store listing is the source of truth — same icon, same screenshots you see here.
I don't love writing this paragraph. But it's the second question I get most often, and the audience matters too much to leave ambiguous.
Where this is going
The roadmap is small on purpose. The next things on it:
- A streak-recovery flow that doesn't shame you when you miss a prayer. Shame breaks habits; gentle return doesn't.
- Optional accountability — letting a friend or spouse see the streak (read-only, opt-in).
- Better adhan customisation, including some lesser-known reciters requested by users in the Maghreb and Indonesia.
That's the shape of it. Build a small honest tool, keep it privacy-respecting, and try to be useful to the person who, at 8:42pm on a Tuesday, almost prayed but didn't.
If you've felt that, this is for you. Try it free, and let me know if it works on your phone: info@quran-mode.app.