NURA · The app

The full athan, played when the moment actually arrives

A notification can tap you on the shoulder, but it cannot give you the whole call to prayer. iOS caps a notification's sound at roughly thirty seconds, so a person with a prayer app open would hear a few seconds of athan and then silence. NURA closes that gap: when a prayer time arrives while the app is open, it plays the complete athan — and it does so under a set of rules designed so the sound is never a surprise and never a nuisance.

What plays, and when

An invisible runner is mounted once in the app shell and watches today's prayer times. Those times are computed deterministically on your device from solar astronomy for your exact coordinates — Muslim World League method by default, with Asr Shafi'i or Hanafi selectable, the same engine behind nuraprayer.com. On a steady, cheap fifteen-second tick, the runner catches the moment a prayer time crosses within a ninety-second grace window and, if permitted, plays the full 154-second athan through the app's audio player.

Every athan passes a gate

Nothing sounds automatically without clearing a decision that runs every hard gate. Unlike a manual “test” press, the automatic path asks first: is a call in progress, are you driving, are you in a meeting, is a focus mode on, is it inside your own quiet hours? A transient “no” is never treated as permanent — the athan is simply left un-played so a later tick within the grace window can retry once the block clears. The gates are:

• An active phone call
• Driving
• A meeting on your calendar
• A focus / do-not-disturb mode
• Your own configured quiet policy

Never twice, never stacked

Two safeguards keep the athan calm. A per-prayer played-lock is persisted, so the same prayer never sounds twice — even across a page refresh, and even if you open the app from the notification. A new day resets the lock, so yesterday's Fajr can never silence today's. A separate playback lock means a refresh, a double event, or two prayers close together can never stack two athans on top of one another. A prayer is marked as played only after playback has actually begun — an earlier version marked it before, so a browser that rejected autoplay would lock the prayer and the athan would never sound; that bug is fixed.

Foreground only — and honest about it

All of NURA's audio is foreground-only. The full athan sounds when the app is open; when the app is closed, the scheduled notification is the tap on the shoulder. NURA does not claim to play a background athan it cannot deliver. Browsers also block autoplay until you have interacted with the page — NURA does not fight that. If the sound is blocked it degrades to a visible notice that shows the prayer time and says, plainly, that the browser blocked the sound until you tap. The athan is always stoppable while it plays, and can be paused, resumed, or muted without losing its place.

The audio, stated plainly

The bundled athan file ships with the app and degrades gracefully to the app's spoken time if it is ever absent. NURA's engineering notes are explicit that the distribution licence for this particular recording must be confirmed — or the file replaced — before an App Store release, and the feature is written so it fails soft rather than breaking if that file is removed. Precision about what is and isn't settled is part of how NURA is built.

On your device, no account

Prayer times and the athan run entirely on your phone. There is no NuroNova server for the core app: your prayer settings and the played-lock live in on-device storage, not on our servers, because we don't run any. No sign-in, no account, works offline.

The athan is one piece of NURA, a free, watch-first Muslim life-companion from NuroNova Genix Co. (Delaware; headquartered in Houston, Texas). Coming soon to iPhone.