I got 500 installs on my first Quran app, then threw the whole thing away and rebuilt it around one screen (Quran Today) - Indie Hackers

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TL;DR: I built a Quran reading app because every app I tried made me do too much before I could just... read. V1 got ~500 installs and taught me the idea was right but the execution wasn't. I rebuilt the whole thing from scratch around a single principle — no dashboard, no gamification, no ads, resume-instantly-on-open — and just shipped it to the Play Store as Quran Today .

The itch that started it

I only had two Quran apps on my phone. Both are genuinely well-built, both are near the top of the Play Store in their category — prayer times, qibla direction, tafsir, multiple qaris, daily duas, reminders, the works.

Every time I opened one, I did exactly one thing: try to get back to the verse I left off at.

That's it. I never touched the qibla compass. I rarely checked prayer times. I basically never used 90% of what those teams had clearly worked hard on.

Classic case of "the product isn't broken, my use case is just narrower than the product." So I started sketching what an app would look like if it only did that one thing, really well.

The part I almost didn't ship: skipping gamification on purpose

This is the one design decision I expect to be the most debated if anyone reads this.

Streaks, badges, daily targets, "don't lose your progress" notifications — I know why these mechanics exist, I've shipped engagement loops before, and I know they work.

I just don't think they belong in this specific product. A reading streak turns "did I read the Quran today" into "did I keep my number alive," and that's a different (and worse) relationship than the one I actually wanted to support. So V2 ships with zero engagement mechanics. No streaks, no notifications nudging you back in, no stats screen showing you your reading history.

I'm fully aware this is the opposite of what most growth advice would tell you to do. I'm treating it as a bet, not a certainty.

V1: shipped, worked, went nowhere interesting

First version shipped. It worked. It got about 500 installs — respectable for a solo weekend-ish project, not exactly a signal of product-market fit.

My first instinct was "the market's saturated, there are hundreds of Quran apps already." My second, more useful instinct a few weeks later: the idea wasn't the problem, the execution was. The UX wasn't mature enough yet, and a bunch of small decisions hadn't actually solved the thing I set out to solve in the first place.

The decision to rebuild from zero

So I did something a little extreme for a side project: I threw out the foundation and rebuilt it.

Not just a fresh coat of paint — I restructured the architecture to be simpler to maintain, and redesigned the interface repeatedly until it stopped feeling like "an app" and started feeling invisible.

Most of my time didn't go into code. It went into embarrassingly small UX questions:

What's the least-friction way to switch surahs?

Does this even need a home screen?

Surah list: full screen, slide-up panel, or a plain dialog?

Verses as cards (modern app feel) or continuous flow (mushaf feel)?

Answering those took longer than writing the actual features.

What shipped

Current version, live on the Play Store, is built around one loop:

Open the app → land exactly on your last read verse. No home screen detour.

No ads, no account, no analytics, no tracking.

Works fully offline.

Bookmark verses into folders, build memorization lists, adjustable fonts/mushaf styles/translations/themes for people who do want to tune their reading setup — but none of it sits between you and opening the app.

Renamed it from FastiQuran to Quran Today along the way, because the old name described how it worked (fast) and the new one describes why it exists (be ready, today, at the verse you left off).

Where it's at right now

Live on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flagodna.fastiquran

Free, no premium tier, no plans to add one

Solo-built, still actively maintained by me

What I'm still unsure about

Whether "zero gamification" is a real differentiator or just a nice story I'm telling myself — genuinely open to being wrong here.

How to grow this without paid ads or a growth loop, given the whole point of the app is "spend less time in the app."

Whether to keep it free forever (current plan) or eventually add an optional support/donation tier without turning it into a paywall.

If anyone's dealt with distribution for a niche, intentionally low-engagement app — genuinely want to hear how you approached it. And if you try it and something feels off in the first 30 seconds of opening it, that's exactly the kind of feedback I want.

Cahyanudien Aziz Saputra

on July 17, 2026

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