What I learned building Kounouz

Kounouz is an Islamic app — Quran, adhkar, prayer times, qibla direction, a digital sebha. On paper, that sounds simple. Apps like this exist already. What made it more complex than I expected was one detail: the Quran isn't stored the same way everywhere.

There are several accepted readings (riwayat) of the Quran. Warsh is the one most commonly used in Algeria and much of North Africa. Hafs is more common elsewhere in the Arab world. The difference isn't small — some words are written and pronounced differently between the two. If I built this app assuming there's only one version of the text, it would be wrong for the exact audience I was building it for.

Why this changes how you build the database

The simple way to build this is one table: surah number, ayah number, text. That works fine until you need a second reading. Then you're stuck — either you duplicate everything, which is messy and hard to keep consistent, or you patch it together with extra columns that only apply sometimes. Neither is a good long-term solution.

Instead, I treated the reading itself as part of the core structure from the start. A verse has an identity — which surah, which ayah — separate from how that verse is written under a specific reading. That took more time upfront than I expected, but it meant that later, when I added multiple reciters for audio, the structure already supported it without needing to be rebuilt.

A small detail that mattered more than I thought

The app also uses iOS Live Activities — the small live updates you see on the lock screen or in the Dynamic Island, used here for things like a prayer countdown.

At first, I assumed the lock screen version and the Dynamic Island version should behave the same way, just displayed differently. After testing it on a real phone, that turned out to be wrong. People use the two in different situations — someone might want the countdown always visible on their lock screen, but find it distracting on the Dynamic Island during the day. So I made them separate settings instead of one combined toggle. It's a small thing, but it came directly from watching how people actually use their phones, not from a spec.

What's working

Kounouz is live on the App Store and Google Play now. The way I structured the Quran data has held up well — I haven't had to redesign it since launch, which is usually a good sign.

The bigger lesson from this project wasn't really about Quran apps specifically. It's that the decisions nobody sees — how the data is structured underneath — are usually where the real difficulty is. Building a nice interface is the easy part. Getting the foundation right for the people actually using it is what takes real thought.

Haithem Nini built Kounouz, an Islamic app covering Quran reading, adhkar, prayer times, qibla direction, and a digital sebha, live on the App Store and Google Play.