Privacy Policy

Effective Date: August 1, 2026 Version 4.5 — supersedes Version 4.0 (April 29, 2025)

Al Islam is built to support your spiritual life — and your privacy is treated with the same care as the app itself. This policy explains, in detail and without evasion, what the app accesses, what stays on your device, what leaves it, and why.

We follow one guiding principle: data minimization. If a feature can work without your data, we do not take it. If it can work on your device instead of ours, it does.

If you use Al Islam without creating an account, no personal data leaves your device.

About This Revision

Al Islam has grown considerably, and this revision sets out in full what the app accesses today. Two releases in particular expanded that:

Version 4.4 ("Miqat") introduced the complete Qibla Finder — including an augmented-reality mode that uses the camera and the device's motion and magnetic sensors — along with the full Hijri calendar system, the Tasbeeh counter, the Qalam notes system with drawings, home-screen widgets, and reminder notifications.

Version 4.5 ("Bayt al-Hikmah") introduced Intelligence, the bring-your-own-key AI layer, and with it voice dictation, which uses the microphone, and the ability to import audio files from your device storage.

Alongside these, features added across the 4.x releases now let you import and export files — custom fonts, audio, and settings backups.

These are meaningful capabilities, and they deserve a policy that describes them precisely rather than in general terms. That is what follows — permission by permission, feature by feature, including a plain list of the things we will never do.

At a Glance

1. Who This Policy Applies To

This policy applies to everyone who uses the Al Islam Android application.

The app is available to users of all ages. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided personal information, contact us and we will remove it promptly.

2. Permissions — Every One, and Why

Android shows a list of permissions on the Play Store listing. Below is every permission Al Islam holds, what it is genuinely for, and whether you can decline it. We would rather explain all of them than have you wonder about one.

Permissions you are asked for, and may decline

Every one of these is optional. The app is fully usable without any of them, and each can be revoked at any time in your device settings without breaking anything else.

Permissions that involve no personal data

Sensors

The Qibla feature reads your device's compass (magnetometer), accelerometer and rotation sensors to point toward the Kaaba and to keep the AR view stable as you move. Android does not require a permission prompt for these.

These readings are used live, on your device, and are never stored, logged, or transmitted. They tell the app which way your phone is facing — nothing more. No other part of the app reads motion sensors.

3. Camera — Qibla Augmented Reality

The AR Qibla mode overlays the Qibla direction on a live camera view.

• No photo or video is ever captured, saved, or transmitted. There is no recording capability in this feature at all.
• The camera feed exists only on screen, only while that mode is open, and stops the moment you leave it.
• Nothing from the camera is analysed, uploaded, or retained. The app does not perform image recognition, face detection, or any processing of what the camera sees.
• Camera permission is optional. Al Islam offers several other ways to find the Qibla, and all of them work without it.

4. Microphone — Voice Dictation

Dictation lets you speak instead of type when writing notes.

Recording is strictly on your command. It begins only when you press record, pauses only when you pause it, and stops only when you stop it. There is no background recording, no wake-word, no always-listening mode, and no silence-detection that starts or stops capture on its own. Nothing anywhere in the app opens the microphone except this feature, and only while you have it open.

Where the recording goes. The audio is written to temporary storage on your device. It is transcribed only when you explicitly ask for a transcript — and it is sent directly to the AI provider you configured, never to us. See Section 6.

You stay in control. You can review, re-record, or delete a recording without ever transcribing it. Temporary audio is overwritten by your next recording and removed when you clear the app's data.

Devices without a microphone can use every other part of the app normally, and can still transcribe an audio file imported from storage.

5. Files and Storage

Al Islam can read and write files, always through Android's system file picker. This matters: the app never receives broad access to your storage. It receives only the specific file you choose, at the moment you choose it. It cannot browse, scan, or index your device.

Files you can import

• Custom fonts (.ttf) for Arabic and Urdu rendering. Stored on your device only. Never uploaded, collected, or transmitted.
• Audio files for transcription. Handled exactly like a recording — sent only to your chosen AI provider, only when you ask.
• Settings files you previously exported, for restoring tasbeeh and calendar configurations.

Files you can export

• Tasbeeh settings and calendar settings, written as plain files to a location you pick. These leave the app entirely and become ordinary files under your control — we neither see them nor keep a copy.

Content the app downloads

Language packs, translations, tafsir and Hadith collections are downloaded on request and stored on your device for offline use. These are downloads of public content; they carry no personal data about you.

The "files and media" permission appears only on Android 10 and below, where the older storage model required it to read a file you picked. On newer versions of Android, the system file picker needs no permission at all.

6. AI Assistance — Bring Your Own Key

Al Islam's AI features (translation, listening, asking, dictation, saved translations and custom commands) run on a bring-your-own-key model. This is a deliberate privacy decision and the most important section in this policy.

You supply the key. To use AI features you connect your own account with an AI provider of your choosing, from a broad catalogue of supported services. There is no shared Al Islam AI account and nothing is billed through us.

Your keys never reach us. API keys are encrypted on your device and protected by your device's hardware-backed secure keystore. They are:

• never transmitted to our servers,
• never written to logs or diagnostic reports,
• never included in cloud backup, under any setting, on any plan,
• never displayed in full again after you save them — only a masked hint remains, so you can tell keys apart.

Your requests do not pass through us. When you run an AI action, your device contacts your chosen provider directly. We operate no proxy, no relay, and no intermediate server for AI traffic. We cannot read your prompts, your content, or the responses — not because we promise not to, but because they never travel anywhere we can see them.

What is sent, and only when you ask. An AI action sends only what that action needs: the verse, hadith, note, or text you selected; any instruction you wrote; and, for dictation, the audio you recorded. For the listening feature, the text to be spoken is sent to the provider that generates the audio. Nothing is sent in the background. Nothing is sent until you tap the action.

The provider's policy governs from there. Once your request reaches your chosen provider, that provider's privacy policy and data-retention practices apply, not ours. Providers differ significantly in whether they retain submitted data or use it to train models. We strongly encourage you to read the policy of any provider before connecting it.

Results stay with you. Saved translations, transcripts, and responses you keep are stored on your device. They are not synced to our servers.

You stay in control. You can delete any connection and its stored key at any time, clear saved AI results, and use the entire rest of the app without ever configuring AI at all.

7. Your Account and Cloud Backup

Using Al Islam without an account

The app is fully local. No account exists, no personal data is transmitted, and nothing is stored on any server.

If you create an account

An account is optional and needed only for cloud backup and premium features. We then hold:

• Email address — for authentication and account identification.
• Display name — the name you choose, shown inside the app.
• Sign-in method — email/password or a social sign-in provider.
• Device session records — device model, Android version, app version, language and region, an app-generated device identifier, and when that device was first seen and last synced.

Session records exist for one reason: so you can see every device your account is signed in on and sign out any you do not recognise. As with any internet service, our servers also record the IP address a request arrives from, as part of normal operation and abuse prevention.

If you use a social sign-in option, we receive your name and email from that provider as part of authentication. We do not store profile photos, and the app does not let you upload one.

Cloud backup (optional, off by default)

If you enable backup, your collections are synced to our servers so you can restore them on a new device or after reinstalling.

To be precise about scope — when backup is on, the data that leaves your device is limited to your profile details, your collection entries, and your device session records. That is the entire set.

Your notes are part of this. Notes in Al Islam live inside your Collections — both notes attached to a saved ayah or narration and standalone note items — so enabling backup syncs them, including their drawings, along with everything else in your Collections.

Backup does not include your tasbeeh counts and routines, reading or search history, prayer and calendar settings, fasting logs, imported fonts, AI keys, or saved AI translations. Those remain on your device whether backup is on or off.

8. Reminders, Widgets and Background Activity

Reminders. The app can show prayer, tasbeeh and calendar reminders. These are generated entirely on your device from data already stored there. No reminder involves a server, and no notification content is transmitted anywhere. If you deny or revoke notification permission, reminders simply do not appear.

Home-screen widgets. Widgets for prayer times and the Hijri calendar read the same local data and draw it on your home screen. They transmit nothing. Note that widget content is visible to anyone who can see your home screen — a consideration for any widget, not just ours.

Background work. The app occasionally does scheduled background work: rescheduling reminders after a restart, refreshing widgets, building the offline search index, and syncing if you enabled backup. This is why the app holds the wake lock and background-execution permissions. None of it involves collecting anything about you.

9. Advertising

Al Islam is free to use, and advertising supports that.

Ads are served by Google AdMob, together with mediation partners including Unity Ads and Liftoff. These partners may process limited device and advertising information — your device's advertising identifier, general device characteristics, and approximate region — to deliver, cap and measure ads under their own privacy policies.

Our commitments:

• On the free plan, full-screen interstitial ads are capped at five per day. That limit is enforced in the app, not merely intended.
• We do not sell your personal data to advertisers.
• We do not share your account details, notes, collections, reading history, prayer data, location, or AI activity with any advertising partner. Ad requests carry none of it.
• Ad personalization is governed by your device settings. You can reset or delete your advertising identifier, or opt out of personalized ads, in Android settings at any time.
• Al Islam Premium removes advertising entirely.

10. Diagnostics and Crash Reporting

To find and fix defects, Al Islam uses Firebase Crashlytics.

A report contains technical information only: the error and its stack trace, device model, operating system version, app version, and a short trail of technical log messages leading up to the failure.

A report does not contain your notes, drawings, collections, AI prompts or responses, API keys, passwords, precise location, recordings, or the content of anything you read or wrote.

This data is used solely to diagnose and fix problems, never for advertising or profiling.

11. Location, in Detail

Location is used for exactly two things: calculating prayer times, and calculating the Qibla direction.

Your coordinates are used on your device for those calculations. They are not stored on our servers and are never attached to your account.

One thing to be precise about. To display a readable place name — "Lahore, Pakistan" rather than a pair of coordinates — the app sends your approximate coordinates to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service. That request carries no name, email, account identifier, or device identifier; it is a lookup of a place, not of a person. If you prefer to avoid it entirely, set your location manually and no lookup is made.

The app does not track your location in the background and does not build a location history. Location is read when you ask it to update, and not otherwise.

12. How We Use Your Data

We use the data described above strictly to:

• Authenticate you and keep your account secure.
• Sync and restore your collections, if you enabled backup.
• Show your active sessions so you can manage them.
• Display your chosen name inside the app.
• Confirm your premium subscription status.
• Diagnose crashes and fix defects.
• Deliver and cap advertising on the free plan.

That is the complete list.

13. What We Never Do

Stated plainly, so you can hold us to it. We never:

• Sell, rent, or trade your personal data.
• Read, scan, or analyse the content of your notes, drawings, collections, or AI conversations.
• Transmit your API keys anywhere.
• Record audio, photographs, or video in the background, or without you starting it.
• Read your camera or microphone outside the one feature that uses each.
• Track your location in the background or build a location history.
• Scan or index your device storage.
• Use your personal content to build advertising profiles.
• Share your data with advertisers or data brokers.

14. Storage and Security

• The app's local database is encrypted on your device, so your content is not readable by other apps or by casual inspection of device storage.
• API keys and other secrets are protected by your device's hardware-backed secure keystore.
• All communication with our servers uses encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS).
• Server-side data is protected by access controls that restrict every record to the account that owns it. No other user can reach your data.
• Your premium status is confirmed from your authentication token, avoiding additional queries against your account.

No system is perfectly secure. We encourage you to use a strong, unique password and to keep your device locked and up to date.

15. Subscriptions and Billing

Al Islam Premium is an optional, auto-renewing subscription available in monthly and annual plans.

All billing, payment processing, renewal and cancellation are handled entirely by Google Play. We do not collect, process, or store any payment information — no card numbers, no billing addresses, no bank details. Prices shown in the app come from Google Play in your own currency and market.

When you purchase, Google Play issues a purchase token, which we verify solely to confirm your subscription is valid.

Full subscription, cancellation and refund terms appear in our Terms and Conditions.

16. Third-Party Services

We are not responsible for the independent data practices of these services, and we encourage you to review their policies.

17. Data Sharing and Disclosure

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with third parties for commercial purposes.

Your data may be disclosed only when required by law, court order, or a valid governmental request, or where necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of Al Islam or its users.

18. Your Rights and Controls

• Delete your account — request deletion at any time. All associated server-side data is permanently removed.
• Get a copy of your data — contact us and we will provide the personal data associated with your account.
• Disable backup — turn cloud sync off at any time. Your local data is unaffected.
• Revoke any permission — location, camera, microphone, notifications and file access can each be revoked independently in device settings.
• Remove AI connections — delete any stored key and its saved results at any time.
• Clear local history — reading and search history can be cleared from within the app.
• Sign out a device — ends that session and removes it from your session list.
• Uninstall — removes all local data from your device.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional statutory rights over your personal data, including access, correction, portability, restriction, objection, and erasure. Contact us and we will honour them.

19. Data Retention

• Account and backup data are retained while your account is active.
• If you delete your account, all associated data is permanently erased from our servers within 30 days.
• Crash reports are retained by our diagnostics provider on a limited schedule and contain no personal content.
• Temporary recordings are overwritten by your next recording and removed when you clear app data.
• Local data is removed when you uninstall the app.

20. International Users

Al Islam is used worldwide. Where your data is processed on our servers or by the third-party services listed above, it may be handled in a country other than your own. Wherever it is processed, it remains covered by the commitments in this policy and protected by encrypted transmission and strict access controls.

21. Changes to This Policy

If we make significant changes — particularly to what we access or how we use it — we will notify you inside the app before those changes take effect.

The version number and effective date at the top always reflect the most recent revision, and each revision states what changed and why.

22. Contact Us

If you have any question, concern, or request regarding this policy or your data, please reach out:

Email: support.alislam@lymrah.com Developer: Al Islam App ID: com.pakdeen.alislam

We aim to respond to every privacy request promptly.

Al Islam — Designed for your spiritual life. Built with respect for your privacy.