When Ayşe Yılmaz discovered the Zikirmatik Pro app during Ramadan last year, she said she appreciated the discipline and calm that it brought to her day. The app reminded her to do the dhikr — a form of Islamic worship where Muslims repeat prayers and holy phrases, while seated in a meditative pose. “I don’t forget which dhikr I was chanting this way,” she told Rest of World. “I also look at the stats of my dhikrs and see how many I do daily, monthly, and yearly. This gives me discipline, and I can monitor my spiritual development.”
On a busy day, a notification from Zikirmatik Pro made sure she took some time for herself. “Pausing for a moment and doing dhikr just for a few moments immensely relieved me,” she said. “I could focus my mind and get back to work fully present.”
Tools to help Muslims with their dhikr recitations stretch back to the invention of the misbaha — strings of 33, 66, or 99 prayer beads. In the 1990s, Chinese-made “dhikrmatics,” calculator-like devices with simple LCD displays that believers use to count their dhikrs while out on a walk or back at home, became popular. Dhikrmatics remain popular gifts for Hajj, Umrah, and birthdays, but a new slate of dhikr apps offer significantly more functionality.
Zikirmatik Pro is one of at least 20 dhikr apps currently available. These apps often feature the dhikr’s text and meaning, accompanied by a counter that increases by one each time the user taps on the screen. Features also include reminders, audio recordings, and stats for the prayers. Most have a functional, minimalist aesthetic, reminiscent of their analog predecessor.
Muhammed Furkan Kılıç, a Turkish app developer and the creator of Zikirmatik Pro, told Rest of World the simple design of the dhikrmatic devices inspired his app.
“Simplicity and minimalist design help fight digital distraction and allow users to focus,” he said. He came up with the idea for Zikirmatik Pro in 2019 after another app he had developed, Ezan Vakti (Prayer Time), became a hit in his country. It featured a dhikr section. “Users wanted an app devoted exclusively to dhikr,” he said. “Tech is a great way to make dhikr and prayers accessible: It allows users to carry them in their pockets.”
Zikirmatik Pro users can review their dhikr statistics weekly to see how much time they have devoted to an individual prayer — think Screen Time but for your prayers. “All the religious rewards of all my dhikrs with this app should be given to the app developers,” wrote one particularly impressed user from Turkey, Başpınar, in his review on Apple’s App Store.
Zikirmatik Pro has a database of more than 10,000 prayers for its around 100,000 users to recite. “All the dhikrs recited by users are saved on their devices,” Kılıç said. “Because we care about privacy, we’ve no data on the individual dhikrs recited by our users.”
Instead of collecting private data, the app encourages users to contribute to its database. “Almost all our users have added one dhikr or several prayers to the archive,” Kılıç said. “We work on their texts with experts and take into account feedback by users.”