Why We Built Just Tasbih

The review that started everything

Before writing a single line of code, we read through the reviews of the two most popular tasbih apps on the App Store — over 10,500 reviews between them, averaging 4.7 to 4.8 stars. Great apps, by the numbers.

But sorted by recent, a different story appears. The single most common complaint, repeated hundreds of times in different words:

Ads. During dhikr.

Not just any ads. Users described dating app ads appearing mid-tasbih. Gambling promotions between counts. Video ads they were forced to watch just to reset their counter. One reviewer wrote that they upgraded to the "Pro" version — and still saw ads.

Worship is not inventory

The ad-tech industry has a word for your attention during a quiet moment: inventory. When a tasbih app is free, your dhikr session is the product being sold. The developer doesn't decide which ad appears between your counts — an auction does, in milliseconds, optimized for whoever pays most.

That's how a dating ad ends up inside worship. Nobody chose it. The system chose it, because the system doesn't know what a tasbih is. It only knows you're a pair of eyes that has been still for eleven seconds.

We don't think that's an acceptable way to fund an app Muslims use for ibadah.

The fix is the business model, not a settings toggle

Here's the uncomfortable truth about ad-funded apps: they cannot remove ads. Ads are the revenue. An "ad-free upgrade" is a patch on a business model that fundamentally depends on interruption — which is why users who upgraded still got burned.

Just Tasbih refuses the model entirely. The app is free, and there is no ad SDK in it, no ad network account, no mechanism to show you anything. The promise isn't a policy that could change — it's an architecture that can't.

What we built instead

A counter that gets out of the way. A strand of glowing beads under your thumb. Your counts, streaks, and history stored on your phone and in your own iCloud — never on our servers, because we don't have any. Reminders computed from your own data, on your own device.

No account. No servers. No analytics. Just tasbih.