Salam!!

It has been over 6 years since we’ve released Pray Watch, Alhamdulillah.

This app has helped many of us in the ummah keep up with our prayers in the midst of a busy, fast-paced world. This was the core mission from the start: leveraging state of the art technologies as a tool to remind us to pray to Allah by following what our Prophet (saw) taught us.

This coincided with the debut release of the Apple Watch and we were amongst the first to release complications on the platform. It was such a good fit to see prayer times on your watch, which is why we named it “Pray Watch“.

There is no shortage of prayer apps in the App Store. However, many were outdated and bloated, with a poor user-experience and unethical privacy tactics. We rose to the opportunity to fill a need to create a quality app that didn’t compromise in its purpose or execution.

And now after 6+ years, we are entering a new generation of apps and we are excited to share with you what we’ve been working on!

We’ve been deep in the lab for the last few months redeveloping the app from the ground up. We know there has been a delay in responding to your questions and requests, and we do apologize for this.

Rest assured that we are listening and rolling everything we’ve gathered and learned into a fresh, evolved Pray Watch, while keeping true to its core mission and minimalist approach.

Let’s give you a sneak peek!

Prayer Times

The prayer ring has been the central theme of the app and has been well-received since day one. We were originally inspired by Apple’s Activity rings and it was a great choice. The times in the 4 corners were inspired by the Apple Watch interface.

These essential design elements will remain unchanged, except for a slight enhancement of the colour scheme and major improvements under the hood.

We used SwiftUI to reuse the design and functionality across widgets and the watch app, whereas before these were maintained separately. This gives us the power to improve, add features, and fix issues from one place and have it propagate across all platforms.

Prayer Settings

The next area we tackled is the settings. Previously, we had simply dumped all of the options into the settings without giving much attention to design. In the new app, we’ve placed them where they make sense contextually, and we’re using collapsible components to group relevant settings together without cluttering the app.

Tones & Sounds

You’ve been asking, and we’ve delivered! We have added a wide variety of new tones and adhan sounds to match any environment or setting you’re in. Whether at home, school, or in the office, we’re confident that you’ll find a tone or adhan sound (and separate Fajr adhans!) to suit your style and preference.

My personal favourite is the Ertugrul theme…eyvallah Bey!

Watch Complications

We also completely redesigned the watch complications! This feature has come a long way so now we’re able to use SwiftUI and have multiple complications per watch face (for the first time ever!).

The centre complication was inspired by the weather app to help you “forecast” your day. We’re also using a gauge to display the progress of time at a quick glance. And finally, we’ve included Hijri date complications that match your app’s settings—and it looks native too! (see top left complication)

And More…

These are just the major improvements and new features. There’s so much more that we’ve included to make Pray Watch even more powerful, with improved performance, and a better user experience than ever before.

And we’re not done yet! A few things left on our list that we’d like to add are:

• Siri support
• More prayer calculations
• Qibla widgets & complications
• Apple Silicon support
• macOS menu bar version
• Accessibility improvements

How to Help

This is a project of the ummah and we would like to offer ways how you can help.

> Become a beta tester!

This will give you early access and let you be a part of the development process.

The beta app will arrive via TestFlight and will be a separate app bundle; in other words, you’ll be able to install side-by-side with the App Store version to ensure it does not interfere with the current Pray Watch version you use every day. This will also enable you to test it against the production app and mess around with the beta settings without causing issues to the real app. Please report any issues and feedback you have on the beta.

Sign up to become a Beta Tester

> Translate the app to your language!

Many of our old translations became out-dated or replaced, so our Arabic and Turkish translations are not complete anymore. We are now using a crowdsourcing translation tool so everyone can help and this should enable us to support more languages with ease insha’Allah.

To start adding translations into the app, please sign up: https://poeditor.com/join/project/1THd9BUvuU

Getting Ready for Launch! 🚀

We are a few steps away from launching the new version and targeting before Ramadan if all testing goes well insha’Allah. We appreciate everyone’s duas and support!