Quran Radio
Live Quran recitation, 310 stations, no ads.
Screenshots
Store listings have the latest shots, links above.
What It Does
Opens to a list of live Quran stations and plays one in a tap. It keeps playing with the screen locked, fades out on a timer when you fall asleep, and shows the surah on the lock screen where the station announces it.
Why We Built It
The category is full of apps with a beautiful player and a list of dead streams. Search Google Play for Quran radio and most of what comes back is a handful of links scraped years ago, half of them now pointing at nothing, with prayer times and a qibla compass bolted on to pad the feature list.
The hard part is not the player. It is having a station list that actually plays.
The Catalogue Is The Product
790 candidate streams from three sources, collapsed to 316 distinct ones, each probed for real audio bytes rather than for a 200 response, because several hosts answer 200 with an empty body. 310 shipped.
The parts a machine could not decide were decided by hand and written down. Every stream that failed was investigated rather than dropped: four turned out to be Shoutcast servers with no source connected, which is off air rather than gone, and one was a slug the operator had retired while their own API still listed it.
Some of what the data said was unwelcome. Radio Browser's Quran corner is mostly spam: 634 rows collapse to 159 distinct streams, and one endpoint had been registered 234 times. A parallel probe reported 37% of streams playable when the truth was about 85%, which would have thrown away half the catalogue had anyone trusted it.
The Risk We Could Not Engineer Away
61% of the catalogue sits with one operator, because the per-reciter streams exist there and nowhere else. A search for independent supply was run to exhaustion and recorded: local-language tags turned out to be a dead end, and local-language names produced ten more stations, moving concentration from 58% to 56%.
So it is survived at runtime instead of pretended away. 181 stations carry more than one address, and the player moves to the next one before it tells you anything failed. The catalogue is data rather than code, so a dead stream is fixed for everyone who already installed the app, without waiting for a release.
Privacy
No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no crash reporting and no server of ours. Favourites and recently played never leave the device.
It does need the network, because it plays live radio, and the privacy policy names the two things that leave the device rather than hiding behind a headline. The app does not host, record or redistribute any recitation: it connects you to the broadcaster.
Current State
In development. Code complete and building, pending device testing and a first release on Google Play.
Key features
- 310 live stations, every one checked for a working stream before it shipped
- 139 reciters reading continuously, with the riwayah named
- Search in Arabic or English, so "afasy" and "العفاسي" reach the same place
- Filter by type, language or country across 18 languages and 37 countries
- Background playback that survives a locked screen, with lock screen controls
- A sleep timer that fades out instead of cutting off
- Favourites and recently played, kept on the device
- No accounts, no ads, no analytics and no tracking