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Everything around the five daily prayers and the Qibla: how prayer times are calculated and why two apps can show different times for the same city, how to find the Qibla anywhere and check it, and how to set adhan notifications that actually work. Where an article touches on a religious ruling, it gives its sources and, where scholars or the four Sunni schools differ, says so rather than presenting one view as the only one; questions that depend on your situation are left to a qualified scholar.
The wudu steps in order and what each school counts as obligatory, the dua after wudu in Arabic with its hadith sources and grades, and what breaks wudu in the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali schools, from bleeding to sleep.
The istikhara dua from Sahih al-Bukhari 1166 in Arabic, transliteration and English, line by line, with how to pray the two rak'ahs, when not to pray them, what the four schools say about signs and repeating it, and whether you need a dream.
Both versions of dua qunoot in full, in Arabic, transliteration and English, with the hadith and Companion reports behind them and a table of when the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali schools recite qunoot.
The adhan arrives on time, at a volume you can hear, and you carry on with what you were doing. That is not a delivery fault. It is a documented property of repeated signals, and it has two research-backed levers.
The figure-of-eight motion fixes one kind of compass error and does nothing for the other. Knowing which fault you have is what decides whether waving the phone helps or wastes your time.
When the adhan does not sound, the app is rarely the problem. The phone is silencing or delaying it, through Focus on iPhone and battery optimisation on Android. Here are the exact settings that stop it.
The qibla is an angle measured from true north, and from almost every US city it runs northeast. Four methods can give it to you, they fail for unrelated reasons, and the sun's widely quoted dates are not the ones that work here.
Seventeen minutes between two phones in the same city, and neither app is at fault. Prayer timetables are built from conventions; which prayers disagree tells you which setting differs, and your mosque's schedule tells you which one to match.
Most apps list "works offline" as a feature and leave it there. The more useful question is why: prayer times are astronomy computed on the device, the qibla is a bearing between two coordinates, and the parts that stop are the ones that were always a search.
