How complete is your athkar app?

A benchmark methodology against the Hisn al-Muslim corpus, with Nedaa’s verified numbers and a template open to community contribution.

Why this benchmark exists

Most Islamic apps include a “morning and evening athkar” section. That phrase obscures a wide range of actual coverage. Two apps with the same headline feature can differ substantially in how many supplications they actually include — and a user has no way to know which is which without going through the app supplication-by-supplication.

This piece documents a methodology for measuring it. Nedaa’s numbers are verified (computed directly from the SQLite database bundled with the app, source code public). Other apps’ numbers are open for community contribution — we’ll publish whatever rows people send in with reproducible counts.

What we’re benchmarking against

The reference dataset is Hisn al-Muslim (حصن المسلم — Fortress of the Muslim), the supplication compilation by Sa’id ibn Ali ibn Wahaf al-Qahtani. It is the standard reference compilation in widespread use across Sunni Islamic communities, with 132 standard categories covering daily occasions (waking, dressing, eating), travel, mosque entry/exit, illness and recovery, marriage and family, financial matters, weather events, and named prayers.

Within those categories sit individual supplications — typically with a Quran or hadith provenance. The full dataset, as bundled in Nedaa, contains 267 supplications across 132 categories.

This is the corpus we measure coverage against. An app’s coverage is the percentage of these 267 supplications it includes (full text, in Arabic, attributable to the right occasion).

What we measure

For each app evaluated, the benchmark records:

Each of these is independently measurable. Where an app does not disclose its source dataset, the benchmark notes “undisclosed” rather than guessing.

How to count, reproducibly

Counting matters more than measuring once. The protocol:

1. Open the app and locate the morning, evening, and occasion-based athkar section. Note where each lives in the navigation.
2. Count categories. Some apps group supplications under named categories matching Hisn al-Muslim’s 132. Others group differently — in that case, map their categories onto Hisn al-Muslim’s 132 manually using the supplication content.
3. Count supplications per category. Match supplications to Hisn al-Muslim entries by content, not by title. The same supplication can appear under different titles across apps.
4. Note whether audio exists for each supplication. If audio is per-category rather than per-supplication, note that and count categories with audio.
5. Check the app’s About screen, settings, or store description for a source disclosure. Record what you find.
6. Submit your counts. Open an issue on github.com/NedaaDevs/nedaa with the app name, version, and your numbers. We’ll add the row.

Results table

Numbers in italics are reproducible from Nedaa’s open codebase. Other rows are pending community contribution; if you’ve manually counted an app, contribute the row.

How Nedaa’s numbers were computed

The 267 / 132 figures are computed directly from the SQLite database bundled with the Nedaa app — assets/db/hisn-muslim.db in the open repository. To reproduce:

git clone https://github.com/NedaaDevs/nedaa.git
cd nedaa
sqlite3 assets/db/hisn-muslim.db "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM athkar;"        # 267
sqlite3 assets/db/hisn-muslim.db "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM categories;"    # 132

This is the kind of measurement we expect from any app claiming a complete Hisn al-Muslim dataset: a verifiable count from published bytes. If an app’s complete coverage cannot be verified, that’s worth recording too.

What the benchmark is not measuring

To stay honest about scope:

• Quality of recitation audio is not measured. Reciter quality is subjective and depends on the listener’s preference.
• UI quality of the athkar screen is not measured.
• Authenticity grading of individual supplications is not measured. Hisn al-Muslim itself is the reference; we measure coverage against it, not against the underlying hadith authenticity grading (which is its own scholarly question).
• Beyond Hisn al-Muslim coverage is not measured. Apps that include supplications outside Hisn al-Muslim (a minority) may have higher absolute counts but the same Hisn al-Muslim coverage percentage; we score the latter.

Why “100%” is not the only thing that matters

A 100% coverage app and a 30% coverage app are different products serving different users. The benchmark exists to make the difference visible, not to declare a winner. A user who only wants morning and evening adhkar and prefers a small, focused app may legitimately prefer a low-coverage app with a clean UI. A user who wants the full daily-occasion catalogue (illness duas, travel duas, household duas, financial duas) is poorly served by an app that only includes 50 supplications.

Coverage is a fact that should be visible at install time, not a discovery the user makes after months of use.

Contribute a row

If you’ve used another athkar app and want to count its coverage:

1. Follow the protocol above. Take ~30 minutes per app, less if the app is small.
2. Open an issue at https://github.com/NedaaDevs/nedaa/issues with the title [athkar benchmark] <app name> v<version>.
3. Include your counts in the field shape above. Note the date you measured (apps update).
4. We’ll publish your row with credit (or anonymously if you prefer).

Credit

The reference corpus is Hisn al-Muslim (Fortress of the Muslim) by Sa’id ibn Ali ibn Wahaf al-Qahtani. The dataset bundled in Nedaa preserves the original 132-category structure and 267-supplication count.

Last updated: 2026-05-10. Methodology is stable; results table updates as community contributions arrive.