Chapter #1: Say Welcome to Fitrah

In an era where indie development apps are so common, finding one that truly resonates with my individual growth journey and my beliefs can be daunting. Enter Fitrah, a beacon of innovation in a sea of uniformity. Today, I'm excited to peel back the curtain on Fitrah, an app to not just meet but exceed the expectations of those on a quest for stay on track of being a good muslim.

The Inspiration Behind Fitrah

There are 2 main reasons behind building Fitrah.

Technical Challenge

While I'm a Senior Mobile Software Engineer at Talabat my main stack in day to day job is mainly Flutter focused. I really like how simple and elegant Flutter is but using Native stack is always my obsession. Also, as a Mobile Platform team member I'm always into low level stuff to support our teams, that's what I really enjoy doing everyday, but I'm miss building product customer facing features from time to time.

Swift, UIKits, and the ugly Xcode are always my go to stack while think in building something for Mobile.

It's almost 2 years now since I built my last customer facing feature 🥲. So I think it's time to start a side hassle project that makes me remember how I tend to build things for normal users with high quality in mind 😉

One more thing is, there are a lot of updates in iOS and Swift world I didn't practice since their official release. That's enough and let's back to work 🛠️

I decided to build this application with highest quality standards and practices based on my 7 years of experience in building Mobile applications. Architecture, Unit Testing, UI Testing, Tooling, and many more will be addressed in our journey.

Personal Challenge

I'm a Muslim الحمد لله and one of the main things I'm keep fighting my self to do is keep saying daily Azkar and reading Quran.

I kept thinking what could I build for almost a year. This Ramadan 2024 I got the idea, why not building something that I can actually enforce my self to use daily as an creator and also keep pushing my self to read Quran.

That's how was my first initial thought of Fitrah started 💡

Key Features of Fitrah

When it comes to Muslim applications out there on AppStore and PlayStore, I almost checked most of them while thinking, they mainly about same things with different approaches to achieve. Azkar, Duaa, Quran, Qibla, Prayers times, and recently they started to add social apps like feed as well as the trendy AI chatting to ask about anything related to religion.

What I would to focus on, beside practice building with Quality in mind:

Privacy First application: No need to build anything related to sociality or user identifications as I'm sure it's out of scope for a religion app. That also makes it very easy to use for all users.
Elegant UI and UX Design: Rather than overload it with features, I need to find and experiment the best UX to deliver features, add feature by feature without compromising UX will be my goal.
Gamification: It's proven. When it comes to competing we will find our self keep fighting to win. Let's use it for our own benefits 🙂

With focus on the above values I'm pretty sure we can stand out in the market and acquire more users and retain them easily.

Why other Application are Bad (for me)?

Ads are everywhere unless you pay for Premium. Why?!!

Religion it self is free, why we monazite it while we are delivering a really bad experience?! I don't know but this question is really challenging for me, millions of users using a really bad experience 😅

Here are the list of challenges I struggled with while using most of the apps:

Ads with every click or Pay for Add free app.
Require Login and collecting information.
Really bad UI and UX.
Overwhelming notifications without options to fully control it.
No incentives to use the application.

I decided to build a thing that could fight all these bad points, at least for me. It's not always a good practice to build what you want not what users want, but there are some standards if you have them you will dominate and be able to fight.

How am I going to build Fitrah?

One of things that I will do really bad is relying on my assumptions for building a product, but I will revisit this point in the future maybe after reaching 10K users.

How I will build it? Pretty easy, same features again but focus on app quality and UX. Here is the very first version of it, Fitrah v1.0.0, and what will it contain.

It will be very focused and only 1 main feature, Azkar. This will allow me to focus on infrastructure of the application design the architecture with better design. Also, focus on tooling and dependencies I will use while building it. No rush for delivery, always focus on quality :)

Conclusion

I bypassed an important step while building a product which is understanding the market better and what are users looking for. But assuming that I'm really a user, I would relay on mu own judge and will see how it goes :)

Being and indie maker is a very powerful thing. No rush for delivery as long as you are financially free and not relying on any income from your free time. I will use it to my own success and show off my skills in development and building a product as well.

Maybe I'll sell this application and buy a Lamborghini Urus one day 😁