Plain answers about the app as it ships today. Also available in العربية.
Noor is an Islamic companion app for iPhone and iPad. It brings together prayer times and Adhan, the complete Quran with audio recitation and translations, the Qibla direction, morning and evening Adhkar, hadith collections, a Hijri calendar, a zakat calculator, a nearby-mosque finder, and a halal ingredient and barcode scanner. It is built Arabic-first and available in twelve languages.
Yes. Noor is free to download and every feature is usable without paying. The free app shows advertising. An optional auto-renewing subscription, Noor Plus, removes the advertising and lets you download Quran recitations for offline listening. Prices are shown by the App Store before you buy, and a subscription can be cancelled from your Apple Account settings.
Not yet. Noor is currently available on iPhone and iPad only. An Android version is in active development and coming to Google Play — we are not listing a date until it is certain.
Largely, yes. Prayer times are calculated on the device from your location, so they keep working with no connection — the same is true of the Qibla compass, the Quran reader, the Adhkar and the Hijri calendar. What needs a connection is anything that has to fetch something that is not on your phone: streaming a recitation you have not downloaded, looking up a product barcode, and searching for nearby mosques.
Twelve: Arabic, English, French, Indonesian, Malay, Turkish, Russian, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Hindi and Hausa. Arabic, Urdu and Persian render fully right-to-left rather than as a mirrored afterthought — Noor was designed in Arabic first and translated outward.
No. Noor works fully without one. An account is optional and does one thing: it syncs your bookmarks and settings across your own devices. You can create it, and delete it along with its data, from inside the app.
As little as the feature you are using allows. Prayer times, Qibla and the Quran reader compute locally and send nothing. Three things do reach a server, because they cannot be answered on the phone: a scanned barcode has to be looked up, a nearby-mosque search has to be run against a map database, and — if you create one — an account has to store the bookmarks it is syncing. Noor does not sell personal data. The full itemised statement is on the privacy page.
You scan a product barcode, or point the camera at an ingredient label. Noor reads the ingredients, matches them against a rules base of ingredients and their juristic treatment, and returns one of three answers — halal, haram, or mushbooh (doubtful) — together with which ingredient produced that answer and the reasoning behind it. The point is the explanation: a bare yes or no on a question the schools differ about is not an answer you can act on.
Where the ingredients do not support a confident verdict, Noor says the result is uncertain and suggests verifying, rather than guessing in either direction. Results are informational guidance based on the ingredients detected and the information available; they are not a certification.
You choose. Noor carries five Sunni juristic profiles and applies the one you select, because a number of common ingredient questions — animal rennet in cheese being the standard example — are matters the schools genuinely differ on. A single flat verdict on a disputed question would be presenting one school's position as the ruling. Where a difference exists, Noor shows it rather than resolving it for you.
From your location, on the device, using the established calculation methods — twelve of them are available, so you can match whichever your local mosque or authority uses. Individual prayers can be adjusted by hand when your community's practice differs from every published method, and a countdown to the next prayer and Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets are included.
It is sourced, not generated. Quran text, hadith, rulings and lesson material are taken from established published sources and carry their references, and Noor holds an evidence standard for what may ship: material that cannot be attributed to an acceptable source is withheld rather than published unattributed. Where the app shows an automated analysis — the halal scanner's ingredient assessment — it is labelled as such and kept visibly distinct from Quran and hadith source material.
Email noorislamicapplication@gmail.com and we usually reply within a couple of days; the support page has more. Deleting your account and its data is done from inside the app, and does not require contacting us.