The short version
- Establish has no accounts, no sign-up and no user profiles. We never learn who you are.
- We collect no personal data and operate no servers that receive your information.
- Your location never leaves your device. Prayer times, the Qibla bearing and the Hijri date are all calculated on the phone itself.
- There are no analytics, advertising or tracking SDKs in the app.
- The app makes exactly one outbound network request, and only when you choose to make it: typing a city name into the search box. Details in section 4.
1. Who we are
Establish (“the app”, “we”, “us”) is an independent app that helps Muslims observe the five daily prayers. It is available on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with an Android version in development; this policy covers every platform on which the app is published.
We are not funded by advertising, we do not sell data, and we have no commercial relationship with any data broker, ad network or analytics provider.
2. Information we do not collect
Establish does not collect, store, transmit or sell any of the following:
- Your name, email address, phone number or any other contact detail
- Account credentials — there is no account system in the app
- Device identifiers, advertising identifiers or IP-based fingerprints
- Usage analytics, screen-view events, session recordings or behavioural data
- Crash reports sent to any third-party service
- Your location history, or any record of where you have been
- Contacts, photos, calendars, health data, microphone or camera input
We do not operate a backend for this app. There is no database anywhere holding a record of you, because no such record is ever created.
3. Location data
Establish asks for your device location for one reason: to work out the prayer times and Qibla bearing where you actually are. Granting the permission is optional — see the end of this section.
-
Prayer times are computed on your device with the open-source
@masaajid/prayer-timeslibrary. Your coordinates are not sent anywhere to produce them. - The Qibla direction is a geometric calculation from your coordinates to Makkah, performed on the device. No network request is involved.
- The Hijri date is derived on the device from the Umm al-Qura calendar built into the operating system. No date or location is sent to any service for this.
-
Your city name — shown so you see “Manchester, United Kingdom” rather than raw
coordinates — is resolved by the geocoder built into your operating system
(
CLGeocoderon iOS,android.location.Geocoderon Android). This is a system service governed by your platform's own privacy policy; the app does not send your coordinates to any third-party mapping server. - Your coordinates are not retained by us. They are held in your device's own storage so the app, its widgets and the Watch app can show the right times, and they are never uploaded.
You can use Establish without granting location access at all. Search for your city by name instead and the app will use that city's coordinates. In that case no location permission is requested or required.
4. Third-party services
One external service is contacted by the app, and only in response to something you do. It is not used for advertising, analytics or profiling.
Photon (Komoot) No GPS coordinates sent
Powers the city search box. When you type a place name, the text you typed is sent to Photon so it can return matching cities. Nothing else accompanies the request — not your GPS position, not an identifier, not a history of previous searches.
Sent: the search text you type, and nothing more.
When: only while you are actively typing in the city search field.
The browser version of Establish, which has no operating-system geocoder available to it, also uses Photon to turn coordinates into a place name. On iOS and Android this never happens — the system geocoder is used instead.
| Feature | Where it runs | What leaves your device |
|---|---|---|
| Prayer time calculation | On device | Nothing |
| Qibla compass | On device | Nothing |
| Hijri date | On device | Nothing |
| Affirmations | On device (bundled with the app) | Nothing |
| Prayer alerts & Live Activities | On device | Nothing |
| Widgets & Apple Watch | On device | Nothing |
| City name from coordinates | System geocoder (Apple / Google) | Handled by the OS, not by us |
| City search by name | Photon | The text you typed |
5. Notifications and alerts
Every prayer alert, pre-alert, follow-up and Live Activity countdown is scheduled locally by your device from prayer times it already calculated. There is no push server, and no notification content is composed, delivered or logged by us. If you revoke notification permission, the app keeps working — it simply stops scheduling reminders.
6. Data stored on your device
Your settings live on your phone and nowhere else. That includes your chosen location, calculation method and madhab, alert and sound preferences, selected affirmation themes, theme and time format, chosen app icon, and cached prayer times.
Some of this is written to a shared app group container so that the widgets and the Apple Watch app can read the same prayer times as the main app. That container is part of your device and is not synchronised to us.
Deleting the app deletes the data. Removing Establish from your device removes everything it stored — there is nothing left behind on a server for us to delete on your behalf.
7. Apple and Google
Downloading the app from the App Store or Google Play is a transaction between you and the platform, not with us. Apple and Google may collect their own information under their own privacy policies, and they provide us with aggregate, anonymised statistics such as total download counts. These reports never identify individual users.
Establish also uses Apple's built-in rating prompt, which the operating system shows at most a few times a year. Any review you choose to leave is submitted to Apple, not to us, and we receive no personal details along with it.
8. Your rights
Privacy laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export and erase the personal data a company holds about you, and to object to it being sold.
Establish holds none. Because we never collect personal data, there is nothing for us to disclose, rectify, export or erase, and there is nothing that could be sold or shared. All the information the app works with is already in your hands, on your device, under your control.
9. Children
Establish is safe for users of any age. It contains no advertising, no in-app purchases, no chat or social features, no user-generated content, and no data collection mechanism of any kind — so no personal information is knowingly or unknowingly gathered from children or anyone else.
10. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially, we will update the date at the top of the page, and — where the change affects how the app handles information — note it in the app's release notes. This page always describes the current published version of Establish.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy, or about how the app handles anything at all? We answer every email.