quran android 2.x

quran for android has seen many changes before ramadan in bringing up the 2.0 release. i just wanted to highlight some of them here, seeing as though i have blog posts talking about other releases of quran android.

what’s new?

• complete code re-write to make the code cleaner and easier to maintain.
• fragment based architecture - pages, translations, bookmarks, etc are all in Fragments, which will make it easier to have a tablet version.
• new, improved ui
• gapless audio playback support
• per-ayah actions (share ayah, show tafseer, etc)
• supports versions 2.1+. older versions (1.5, 1.6) still run the older version.

what happened to the source?

we get lots of support emails. one thing we noticed was a few strange emails about “great app, but please remove ads,” and so on. we would always ask these users, “what are you talking about? our app doesn’t have ads! what are you talking about? please send us a link to the app you are using?”

finally, after a few months, someone sent us a link to an app on the store. the app was our exact 1.6 version of the application, with one major difference - ads. ads everywhere - even on top of each quran page as you were reading it.

this is a problem for several reasons:

1. it is not befitting of the book of Allah to have Quran pages with ads on the top of each page. imagine reading a page and seeing an ad about a brand of alcohol, for example.
2. it is someone making money off our work and effort.
3. if we wanted to make money off our app, we would have sold a premium version with more features.
4. whenever you want to make money off something, an issue of copyrights, etc comes into question (are we legally allowed to distribute these translations, audio files, etc?).

this is also the reason why quranworks for ipad has a light version which only gives you the 30th juz’, and you can either pay (in-app purchase) for the full quran or you can just buy their separate paid app. while i don’t think this as a good solution, i think it’s certainly a lot better than ads on each page. by the way, those guys have an awesome intro video masha’Allah.

so as a result of this, and in addition to the fact that we had very few contributors (and most of those contributors are people who are friends in real life), we removed the code from github.

statistics

due to a bug in google’s algorithms, we were completely unranked between january and august. after numerous emails during ramadan and much du3a, al7amdulillah, they finally fixed our rankings. by the grace of Allah, we were in the top 25 free books & reference applications during ramadan. today, in the us store, we are in the top 70 free books & reference applications. al7amdulillah.

screenshots