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What people want from a Quran app

Why do people leave the Quran apps they have, and what would make them install a new one?

We read about 14,400 low-star Google Play reviews of 18 Quran and Islamic apps, along with smaller sets of reviews and public forum posts, to learn what people miss. Ads came first, followed by paywalls on the main feature, translation problems and bugs.

Reviews that mention each theme (keyword counts)

The counts are approximate and come from keyword matching, so they rank the themes and are not percentages.

At a glance

Where we are

The study of public reviews is written, and the next step is to talk with teachers, whose voices the reviews barely reach.

What we are aiming for

  1. Learn why people leave the Quran apps they have, in their own reviews and posts.
  2. Find which features would make someone install a new Quran app.
  3. Let what we learn shape how we build our own Quran apps.

What we did

We read about 14,400 low-star Google Play reviews of 18 Quran and Islamic apps, because a low-star review usually says plainly what went wrong. Alongside those we read about 5,300 reviews of apps for memorising the Quran and for teaching it, and about 340 App Store reviews that we copied by hand.

We also went through public archives of Reddit and Hacker News, reading some threads in full and others by title, and counted 469 titles that ask about reciters. We have kept the names of the apps out of this page, because the aim is to learn what people need rather than to single anyone out.

What people complain about most

Ads were the most common complaint, in about 2,260 reviews across 12 apps. Next came paywalls on the main feature, in about 960 reviews across 10 apps, then problems with translation in about 900 reviews, and bugs in about 650.

About 290 reviews across 13 apps were from people unhappy that an update had taken away something they used. The counts come from keyword matching, so they show which themes come up most rather than what share of all reviews each one makes.

A question that keeps growing

One request kept coming back, from people who hear a recitation and want to know who the reciter is. We counted 22 such requests in 2021, 53 in 2024 and 84 in 2025, and there were already 113 in 2026 by the time of the study.

Requests asking which reciter it is, by year

Only the years with a count are shown, and 2026 runs to the time of the study.

What this means for how we build

The study points towards apps that work offline, with anything that needs the internet kept separate and turned on only by the person who wants it. For our own Quran apps, it means no ads, never taking away a feature people rely on, and being honest about what an app cannot do yet.

The study was written to inform our thinking, and when it was finished nothing in our apps had been changed or decided because of it.

What we have not covered

We could not reach Facebook groups or X, so what people say there is missing. Reviews written in Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian and Turkish were barely sampled, and we found nothing on how teachers and students use voice notes.

What comes next

The most useful next step is to sit down with three or four teachers and hear from them how they and their students use Quran apps and recordings, since the reviews tell us very little about the classroom.