Qibla Compass

A Qibla compass that tells you the truth — including when it cannot be sure.

Most of the work in this app went into two things: pointing the needle at the Kaaba correctly, and being honest with you when your phone can't.

WHY OTHER COMPASSES CAN BE WRONG

The Qibla is a bearing from true north. Your phone's compass measures magnetic north. The gap between the two is the local magnetic declination — under 2° in the Gulf, but more than 15° in parts of North America and northern Europe. An app that ignores it points you off by that much.

This app corrects for it, using the World Magnetic Model already built into your phone's operating system. No download, no network, no guessing.

WHEN NOT TO TRUST YOUR PHONE

A phone's magnetometer that has drifted, or is sitting next to a laptop, a car dashboard or a magnetic case, does not wobble or look broken. It points somewhere plausible and holds steady while being tens of degrees wrong.

So the compass accuracy is shown on screen at all times, the needle dims when the reading is suspect, and a five-second calibration guide is one tap away. It also tells you the thing no amount of calibrating will fix: a magnetic case, ring or car mount has to come off.

HOW YOU USE IT

Turn until the brass needle reaches the mark at the top of the frame. That is the whole instruction. It buzzes when it lines up, so you don't have to watch the screen while you aim.

You also get the exact bearing from true north, the great-circle distance to the Kaaba, and the magnetic declination being applied where you are.

PRAYER TIMES THAT MATCH YOUR MOSQUE

• 23 calculation methods, from Umm al-Qura and Diyanet to ISNA, Karachi, KEMENAG and MWL
• Both Asr schools — standard and Hanafi
• A high-latitude rule for places where the sun never sets far enough
• Per-prayer offsets of up to an hour, so the timetable can match the mosque down the road
• Countdown to the next prayer, and reminders for the prayers you choose

Times are shown in the clock of the place they were calculated for, not your phone's. Check the times for family in another country and you get their times, on their clock.

WORKS WITH NO CONNECTION

The compass, the bearing, the distance, the prayer times and the reminders are all computed on your device. 282 cities are built into the app, so you can set a location by hand on a plane, in a basement, or on a tablet with no GPS. You can also type coordinates directly.

Only the map screen needs a connection.

THE MAP

A real great-circle line from where you are to Makkah — the actual shortest path over the globe, which is why it curves on a flat map. It is there as a second opinion on the needle, not decoration.

15 LANGUAGES

English, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Indonesian, Malay, Bengali, Hindi, Swahili, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Portuguese, with proper right-to-left layout for Arabic, Urdu and Persian.

YOUR LOCATION STAYS ON YOUR PHONE

Your position is used on your device and nowhere else. It is not sent to us. There is no account, no sign-in, and no reverse geocoding — the app never asks a server "where is this person". A city you choose by hand is saved on the device and left out of cloud backup, because for most people it is their home.

No coordinate is ever recorded in analytics. Opening the map screen does request map tiles from OpenStreetMap, which reveals roughly where you are looking to their servers; that is the one exception, and it only happens on that screen.

A NOTE ON PRECISION

The app locks on within five degrees. That is a limit of how accurately a phone can be aimed, not a religious ruling. Scholarly positions on acceptable deviation are considerably more forgiving. If you can face the direction with reasonable care, that is what is asked of you.