I’ve been a long-time premium user of this app, along with my family, and had paid specifically to remove ads many years ago. I was taken aback to find that on the first night of Ramadan, the app had become unusable because of a flood of ads for Chinese retail outlets kicking in every few seconds, making it impossible to do anything or see prayer times. I tried to restore my purchases, but found the developer had turned this feature off. I emailed to ask about this, and was sent a boilerplate email telling me that they had basically decided to downgrade me without telling me, for no clear reason (something about free upgrades rolled out in the past?). In other words, this developer took money from me for a specific feature (to remove ads) and then decided to restore the ads and expect me to pay more money for the privilege of reacquiring the service I’d already paid for. They then ignored any follow-up questions. Bear in mind they timed this to start with Ramadan. I’ve not met a more cynical, unethical ploy in many years on the App Store, and it’s grotesque it’s coming from a company offering prayer timings. I don’t see how this isn’t fraudulent behavior because I paid for a permanent upgrade and they’ve quietly removed that upgrade. So I’ve basically deleted this app from all my family’s devices and have moved on to other prayer timings apps, of which there are plenty, thankfully. Also - bear in mind that they’ve made it harder to delete your account details now because they’ve changed the sign-in options. This is not reassuring given what we know about apps like this selling user data to foreign governments. I am removing all their apps.
We are deeply sorry for this experience. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, we will make sure to pass your feedback to our team for review and improvement.