Building Istiqomah: A Habit Tracker App with No Server and No Account

Istiqomah came from a simple need: I wanted a daily worship tracker that wasn’t a hassle — no account required, no ads, and most importantly, no personal data sent to any server.

The design principle is built around atomic habits: start small, track effortlessly, watch progress grow. Features include a daily worship checklist, accurate prayer schedules (GPS-based or by city selection), a qibla compass, a 114-chapter digital Quran with translations, an Islamic calendar with fasting-day markers, and progress tracking through streaks and heatmaps.

The biggest technical challenge wasn’t the features — it was the “no-backend” architecture: all data (prayer schedules, progress, preferences) has to be computed and stored entirely on-device, with no API calls to any server for personal data. For prayer schedules, for example, I use a local astronomical calculation library instead of an external API.

I built native versions for iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin) — not a cross-platform framework — so I could use the device’s compass sensor directly and squeeze out maximum performance on each platform.

The result: an app that’s light, fast, and — most important to me — doesn’t trade away user privacy for development convenience.