1. Who publishes the app
AWAS is published by AstafLab, an independent developer. Questions about this document can be sent to contact@astaflab.com.
2. What this document covers
This document covers the AWAS Android app, package com.astaflab.awas, distributed on Google Play.
It does not cover third-party services you use elsewhere, including Google Play itself, which applies its own rules.
3. Data collected
AWAS collects nothing. In practice:
- there is no account, no sign-up and no identifier of any kind: the app generates neither an advertising ID nor a technical one;
- it does not read your location or use the GPS;
- it does not read your contacts, system calendar, camera or microphone, and reads no file other than an adhan recording you hand it yourself (section 4);
- it contains no analytics or measurement tooling;
- it shows no advertising and embeds no ad network;
- it makes no network requests at all. AstafLab runs no server, and so receives nothing about you. To learn whether a newer version of the app is out, it asks the Google Play app on your phone, as section 6 explains.
4. Data kept on your device
The app saves your settings on your device, in four files:
- the places you have saved (name, latitude, longitude, elevation and time zone), each with its own calculation method, per-prayer minute corrections, and the rule its Hijri date follows with any day shift you set, plus which place is currently selected;
- your general preferences: the school followed for Asr, the school shown in the voluntary prayers, the theme, the language, your prayer-alert settings, the method the qibla compass uses, whether the home screen follows the Gregorian or the Hijri day, and when the app last offered you an update;
- any calculation methods you have defined yourself;
- the notes you write against a date in the calendar. These are free text you type yourself; the app stores and redisplays them, and does not read or analyse them.
These files live in the app's private storage, which other apps cannot read. They are sent neither to AstafLab nor to anyone else: the app makes no network requests.
Android may include the first three in your device's automatic backup to your Google account, as it does for other apps, so your places, your preferences and your own calculation methods follow you to a new phone. That backup is a system feature, controlled in your Android settings; it does not pass through AstafLab, who has no access to it.
Your notes are deliberately kept out of it. They are the one file here whose contents the app cannot anticipate, because you wrote them, so they are excluded from that backup and from the direct phone-to-phone transfer alike. A note stays on the device it was written on. The cost is worth stating plainly: your notes do not follow you to a new phone.
If you choose the adhan as your alert style, the recording you pick through the system's file picker is copied into that same private storage: it stays on your device, travels only in that backup like your places and preferences, and never reaches AstafLab. The recording is your choice and your responsibility: AWAS ships none, reads no file other than the one you hand it, and passes it on to no one.
All of it is erased when you uninstall the app, or when you clear its data from the Android settings.
5. Android permissions
AWAS requests no permission that grants access to personal data: no location, no GPS, no contacts, no shared storage, no camera, no microphone, no phone.
The permissions it declares exist only for prayer alerts and the qibla compass's vibration, and two of them only for the adhan:
- VIBRATE: to vibrate for an alert when you choose that style, and to give one short pulse when the qibla compass faces the Kaaba. Granted at installation.
- POST_NOTIFICATIONS: to show the alerts. Android asks you for it the first time you turn one on; declining does not stop you using the app.
- SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM: to fire an alert at the minute it is due, rather than at the system's next batched wake-up. On recent versions of Android this is not granted at installation, AWAS asks for it when you turn a prayer alert on, when you open the app with an alert already on and it is missing, when you choose the adhan, which cannot be played to the end without it, and if you tap the notification permissions row in its own settings, which reads what Android allows and asks nothing on its own. Refusing it turns the prayer alerts off rather than letting them arrive at the wrong minute.
- RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED: to put the alerts back in the queue after the device restarts.
- FOREGROUND_SERVICE and FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK: to play the adhan to the end in a service of the app's own, with a visible notification, rather than as a notification sound the phone may cut short. Granted at installation, as Android does for these two, and used only while an adhan is playing.
- REQUEST_IGNORE_BATTERY_OPTIMIZATIONS: to show Android's own dialog asking to let AWAS run unrestricted in the background, so that a phone which ends background work does not hold an alert back or stop the adhan early. Asked when you turn a prayer alert on, whatever its style, and when you open the app with one already on. Refusing it never withholds an alert; the answer is yours, and the same system page withdraws it.
None of these gives access to anything about you, and nothing is transmitted when they are used. If you turn on no alerts, none of them comes into play except VIBRATE, for the compass's pulse; if you never choose the adhan, the entries about it are never used.
Prayer times are computed locally from the coordinates of the place you chose, not from a position read off the device, and so is the direction of the qibla.
The qibla compass reads the phone's motion sensors (the magnetometer, gravity and the gyroscope), which Android lets an app read without a permission. It reads them only while the app is open, uses the readings to turn the compass on screen, and neither keeps nor sends them.
6. Third-party components
The app bundles open source components. All of them run locally, on the device, and open no network connection:
- the PyEphem astronomical engine, which runs on the device;
- a Python interpreter and the supporting libraries it needs to run that engine on Android;
- the Flutter framework, and the flutter_local_notifications and timezone libraries, used for the alerts;
- the url_launcher library, which hands the website link in the About section to your browser;
- a city database derived from GeoNames, licensed CC BY 4.0, shipped inside the app and searchable offline;
- two typefaces under the SIL Open Font License.
None of these components sends anything anywhere. Their licence texts ship with the app and can be read in it, under Settings → About → Open source licences.
The app also includes one component that is not open source: Google's in-app updates library, part of Google Play. It opens no network connection either. When you open the app, it uses the library to ask the Google Play app on your phone whether a newer version of AWAS is out. If one is, Google Play's own window offers it to you, at most once every three days, and you are free to decline. Google Play answers that question and downloads the update under its own privacy rules. According to Google, it uses information about the device and about the installed version of the app to work out whether an update exists and how large it is; that information is encrypted, and passed to no third party. None of your places, settings, notes or recordings is involved.
Downloading and updating the app goes through Google Play, which applies its own privacy rules to that exchange, independently of this document.
7. Children
AWAS collects no data from anyone, at any age. No separate provision for minors is therefore needed.
8. Your rights
AstafLab processes no personal data about you. There is consequently no record, no profile and no history held by AstafLab to access, correct or delete.
The settings, notes and recordings stored on your device remain entirely under your control: change or remove them in the app, or remove them all by clearing the app's data or uninstalling it.
9. Changes
Any future feature that would require a network connection, an in-app purchase or the processing of data will be reflected in an updated version of this document, published on this page before that feature ships.