Reminders

Reminders lets Al Islam tell you when something is due: the five daily prayers, a page of the Qur'an before sleep, morning and evening dhikr, a fast, a date in the Hijri year, or anything else you want to be reminded of. Prayer reminders are ready from the moment the app is installed, and everything else is yours to add.

Each reminder can arrive the way you choose — from a quiet notification to a full-screen alarm that rings until you answer it — and can open exactly where you need to be when you tap it, down to a single verse or a single chapter of a hadith collection.

Experimental

Reminders carry an Experimental label in this version of the app, beside the Reminders title and on its tile in Tools.

Delivering a reminder at an exact minute depends on how your phone manages apps in the background, and manufacturers handle this differently. The feature is complete and in everyday use; the label says that it is still being refined across the wide range of Android phones.

Tap the label to read a short explanation. From there, Report a problem opens an email to our support address with your phone model, Android version and app version already filled in, so you only need to describe what happened. The setup steps described under Phone Settings are the most effective way to make reminders dependable on your phone.

Opening Reminders

Reminders lives under Tools → Reminders.

It can also be reached from Prayer Times: each prayer's detail screen carries the reminder for that prayer, and the Prayer reminders screen lists every moment of the day in one place. The Tasbeeh counter's dhikr reminder is managed here too, alongside everything else.

How Reminders Reach You

The first time you open Reminders, the app asks How should reminders reach you? and offers four styles. Your choice applies to every reminder you have and to new ones, and you can change it at any time — or give any single reminder a style of its own.

Show me one now sends a sample in the selected style so you can see and hear it before deciding.

To change the style later, open the settings in Reminders and use How reminders reach you → Arrives as. The change applies to all of your reminders at once.

Phone Settings

After you choose a style, the app checks what your phone needs in order to deliver it and walks you through each item, one step at a time. Only the steps your phone actually needs are shown, and each one opens the relevant system setting directly.

A step can be skipped with Not now and completed later from the Reminders settings, where the app shows whether anything still needs attention.

Reminders are scheduled again automatically after your phone restarts, and after a change to its time or time zone.

The Reminders Screen

The Reminders screen has four tabs.

Add a reminder starts a new one, from scratch or from a ready-made reminder. Tap any reminder to edit it, and Duplicate in the editor makes a copy to adjust — a second reading reminder at another time of day, for instance. Built-in reminders can be switched off rather than deleted, so they are easy to turn back on later.

If you leave the editor after changing something, the app asks whether to keep editing or discard the changes; if you only looked, it simply closes.

Pause silences every reminder for 1 hour, 4 hours or until tomorrow. Nothing is switched off or deleted; reminders stay quiet until the pause ends, and Resume ends it early.

Adding a Reminder

Tap Add a reminder and choose how to begin: Start from scratch and write your own, or pick a ready-made reminder and adjust it.

Ready-made reminders

Every ready-made reminder can be edited like one you wrote yourself.

Kinds of reminder

Each kind can be limited to particular days of the week with Only on these days. The editor shows when the reminder will next arrive, so you can confirm the schedule before saving.

What It Says and Where It Takes You

The words

Every reminder has a name — Read a page, Call mum — which is also its headline unless you write another.

Under What it says, each reminder shows exactly how it will appear on your lock screen. Keep the app's own wording, or choose Use my own words to write your own headline and a line underneath — an ayah, a nudge, anything you like.

The destination

Under Where it takes you, choose what opens when you tap the reminder:

The surah and collection lists are searchable.

How Each Reminder Arrives

Under How it arrives, every reminder has its own settings. New reminders start from the defaults set in the Reminders settings.

Snooze appears as a button on the full-screen alarm and on the notification itself, so a reminder can be put off from the lock screen without opening the app. The full-screen alarm also offers Open, which takes you to the reminder's destination. Both buttons are large enough to use comfortably when you have just woken up.

Send one now, to see it delivers the reminder immediately, exactly as it will arrive.

Quiet Hours and Pausing

Reminders can stay quiet when a reminder would not be welcome.

On each reminder, in the editor:

• Quiet hours — a window during which this reminder does not sound.
• Not while I'm in the app — stays quiet if Al Islam is already open.
• Not if I've used the app today — skips the day if you have already opened the app.
• Switched on — turn a reminder off without deleting it.

As defaults, under When they may speak in the Reminders settings, the same choices — quiet hours, not while you are reading, and not if already done — set where each new reminder starts. Reminders you have already made keep their own settings.

For everything at once, Pause everything keeps every reminder scheduled but silent, for a meeting or a flight, and Resume ends the pause.

A reminder held back by any of these is recorded as held back, not as missed.

Notifications From Al Islam

Besides your reminders, the app can notify you of two kinds of news, each of which you can switch off under From Al-Islam in the Reminders settings:

These notifications apply to the version of the app you have, so you are never told about something your version does not include.

Prayer Reminders

Reminders for the five daily prayers are switched on when the app is installed.

Prayer Times → Prayer reminders gathers all eight moments of the prayer day — Fajr, Sunrise, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha, Midnight and the Third of Night — in one list. Each row shows when that reminder will next arrive, with a switch to turn it on or off. The same reminder is also available from each prayer's detail screen.

Prayer reminders follow the location and calculation settings you use in Prayer Times, including any adjustments you have made so that times match your mosque. See Prayer Times.

Checking Delivery

Every reminder keeps a record of what happened each time it was due. It appears in Delivered and in each reminder's Has it been arriving? section.

Each occurrence is described in plain words:

A summary at the top — for example Everything has arrived, or Arriving, but sometimes late — describes the recent pattern.

Tap any record to read what happened, why it happened, whether the phone or the app was responsible, and what — if anything — can be done. When a phone setting is responsible for a late or missing reminder, the record names that setting and offers to open it.

Making Sure Reminders Arrive on Time

Delivered shows what each reminder did. To tell us about a problem, tap the Experimental label and choose Report a problem.