Barakah is built by Sumit Sharma. A revert from India, now in Dubai, with twelve years behind him in social, marketing, and PR. He spent a decade learning every dark pattern that keeps a user scrolling, and the whole point of this app is to refuse all of them.
I took my shahada in 2017, in India, where I was born. The first thing I did was the same thing every revert does. I reached for my phone. I needed to know how to pray, where Makkah was from my bedroom, what to say after salah, whether the biscuits in my kitchen were halal. The experience of looking it up was a small disaster.
Ten Muslim apps open at once. Half of them paywalled. Half of them drowning in ads. A push notification trying to sell me a fifty-nine dollar a year plan before I had prayed Fajr once. One app was openly fighting a war between madhabs in its FAQ section. Advice from search engines was confident and contradictory. Hadiths quoted without grades, verses pulled out of context, a thousand voices and very little quiet.
Barakah is my long, slow attempt to fix that. We studied every major Muslim app on the market, mapped the gaps the ummah actually keeps running into, and built around those gaps. We are still developing further, with new tools shipping regularly, on the way to being the one and only solution for every part of a Muslim's daily deen.
The notification timed to land when you are bored. The red dot that promises something you did not ask for. The streak that punishes you when life gets in the way. The trial that vanishes into a recurring charge. The home feed engineered to make leaving feel like loss. I have spent more than a decade in marketing, social, and PR. I understand the machinery from the inside.
I started in 2014 by accident, with a single meme page. It grew, so I made another, and another. Over a few years the network across them passed twenty million followers. When Facebook changed its rules in 2017 and the whole model collapsed for page operators, I sold what I could and moved on. The years after were a sequence: marketing, then crypto marketing, then PR, Wikipedia management, and crisis communications. The agency work paid the bills and taught me what attention really costs.
When I built Barakah, every one of those tools sat on the table. I picked them up, looked at each, and put them back down. None of them belong here. You should not need a guilt trip to read Quran. You should not have to dismiss a banner to find Fajr. You should not be tagged with an advertising ID while you make dua. The deen is not a funnel.
Premium is for the people who can pay it. Free for anyone who cannot and just asks. Sadaqah jariyah for the ones who do.
Started a social media page that nobody expected to go anywhere. It went somewhere. Spent the next few years building, buying, growing, and selling pages until the network across them crossed twenty million followers.
Facebook changed the rules for page operators that year and the model fell apart for everyone. Around the same time, alhamdulillah, I took my shahada. Two endings, one beginning, the same year.
Pivoted into proper marketing and PR. Spent years on agency work. Campaigns, Wikipedia management, crisis communications for people who had made the news for the wrong reasons. Learned more about how attention is bought and shaped than I would ever use again on a Muslim.
Came to the UAE on the way to something else and stayed. Adhan from the masjid five times a day. Halal food without a hunt. Mosques on the walk home. Two and a half years in and the city is still rearranging the way the deen sits in a daily life.
Began Barakah in evenings, then weekends, then most of life. Shipped in late 2026 with the version I wished I had on day one of being Muslim. Still adding to it, still listening, still solo.
The first months after the shahada were lonely. India in 2017 did not give a brand-new Muslim a clear path. I did not have a masjid to walk into. I did not have an uncle to call. I had a phone and a search bar and a lot of confusion.
Two scholars made the next year possible for me. Mufti Menk hafidhahullah, on Instagram and YouTube, gave reminders that made the most ordinary day feel held. Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem hafidhahullah, with his patient question-and-answer style, gave me the precise rulings my situation actually needed. I never met either of them. I owe both of them more than I can repay in this life. May Allah preserve them and accept from them.
The lesson of those years sits inside every page of this app. The right voice, at the right moment, in the right tone, can change a life. The app is here to be that for the next person.
In India I had to fit the deen into life. In Dubai life is already shaped around the deen, and you fit yourself into it. The adhan from the masjid is the timer for the day. Halal is the default, not the exception. Friday is Friday, not a Tuesday-with-extra-steps. The first few months in Dubai I felt my prayers settle into a rhythm I had been chasing for five years.
Both places gave me what the other could not. India taught me how to keep the deen alive in a setting that does not support it. The UAE taught me what it looks like when a city does. Barakah carries both. The app should be useful to a Muslim in Hyderabad, in Bradford, in Atlanta, in Sharjah, in Cape Town. The same prayer times, sourced the same way, with the same care.
Written from the perspective of someone who has built the things on this list, decided not to repeat them, and wrote them down so the next person can hold me to it.
Quran: Arabic text from Tanzil and the King Fahd Complex Mushaf. English translations from Saheeh International, Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, Mufti Taqi Usmani, and others. All public-domain or licensed for non-commercial use.
Hadith: the six canonical collections (Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, an-Nasa'i, Ibn Majah) and the Muwatta of Imam Malik. We prefer sahih and hasan gradings and cite collection plus number on every entry.
Prayer times: computed locally on your device using the standard astronomical method with your chosen angle convention (Muslim World League, ISNA, Egyptian, Umm al-Qura, Karachi, Tehran, Jafari, Singapore). No round-trips to a server.
Hijri calendar: calibrated daily against the AlAdhan HJCoSA endpoint that tracks the Saudi moonsighting committee, so Ramadan and Dhul Hijjah do not drift the day off as the JS built-in tables sometimes do.
Halal data: public ingredient databases plus community-voted verdicts plus certifier registries. Crowd-sourced, then cross-checked. Country-tagged because the same product can be halal in one place and doubtful in another.
If Barakah helps one person pray on time, finish their first khatam, scan a doubtful product, or feel less alone in their ummah, that is enough. If it helps many, alhamdulillah. If it pulls one revert through their first month, if it makes Friday Surah al-Kahf a habit for even ten people, if a sister finds the right adhkar for her commute, every one of those is sadaqah jariyah for everyone who supports the work.
"When a person dies, their deeds end except for three: a continuing charity, a knowledge that benefits, or a righteous child who prays for them."
Sahih Muslim 1631
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