Privacy policy

What stays on your phone

Your notes, bookmarks, collections, reading position, settings, memorisation progress, prayer and Qaḍāʾ records, and tasbih counts are stored on the device only. We never receive them. Removing the app removes them.

What the app collects

Nothing, unless you turn on one of two optional settings. Both are off until you say yes, and you can change them at any time under Settings › Privacy.

• Crash reports (Google Firebase Crashlytics). If on, a report is sent when the app crashes, describing the crash and the device model and Android version.
• Anonymous usage statistics (Google Firebase Analytics). If on, the app sends which screens and features are used, from a fixed list of names. It never includes what you search for, read or write, no note contents, no identifiers of the texts you open, and no advertising ID.

Google processes this data for us under its own terms. We use it only to see where readers get stuck.

When the app uses the internet

Only when you ask it to. It has no background network activity.

• Downloads. When you press Download on the Downloads or Voices screen, the app fetches that file from our public data repository on GitHub, or for some voices from Hugging Face. Those services see your IP address and the request, as with any download. Each file is checked against a fingerprint (SHA-256) and is kept only if it matches.
• Check for updates. The button on the Downloads screen fetches the latest list of downloads from the same repository.
• Links you tap to a source open in your browser, which then follows that website's own policy.

Permissions the app asks for

• Internet, network state: for the downloads above.
• Notifications, exact alarms, start at boot: for prayer time reminders, which are scheduled on the phone.
• Foreground service, wake lock: to finish a download while you read, and to keep reading aloud going.
• Vibrate: for the tasbih counter.

The app does not ask for your location, contacts, camera, microphone or storage. Prayer times are calculated on the phone for a place you choose.

Reading aloud

Voices you download run on the phone. If you use your phone's own speech engine instead, text is handled by that engine under its provider's policy.

The website and its contact form

This section is about the website, shiailm.com. The website sets no cookies, runs no analytics or advertising, and loads nothing from other companies' servers: its fonts and pictures come from the site itself. Your choice of light, dark or system appearance is saved in your own browser and is never sent to us.

The website is hosted by Cloudflare. As with any website, Cloudflare receives your IP address and the addresses of the pages you open in order to deliver them, and handles them under its own privacy policy. Cloudflare shows us overall traffic figures, such as the number of visits; we do not use them to identify anyone.

If you write to us with the contact form, we keep what you send (your name if you give it, your email address, the topic and the message), the language of the page and the time. To stop floods of messages we also keep a scrambled form of your IP address (a salted hash) instead of the address itself. This is stored in a database at Cloudflare, and the message is also emailed to us.

Cloudflare also keeps a technical log of each form submission for a few days, so that we can find faults. It includes details of the request, such as your IP address and your browser, but not the message you wrote.

We use what you send only to reply to you. Ask us and we will delete it.

Children

The app and the website are not directed at children under 13. The app collects no personal information from anyone; the website keeps only what someone sends through the contact form.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version is posted here with a new date.

Contact

Questions: contact@shiailm.com.