Legal
What the DigitalShul mobile app for Android and iOS does with your information. Everything you type in stays on your phone; what leaves it is a pair of coordinates and a date — and, if the app crashes, a report describing the failure.
Last updated: 22 September 2026
This policy covers the DigitalShul mobile app for Android and iOS. It does not cover this website — for that, see our Cookie Policy — nor the DigitalShul display service for shuls, which is covered by our Terms & Conditions.
The app calculates Jewish prayer times for wherever you are. To do that it needs to know your position, and it asks a public calendar service to do the astronomical arithmetic.
Everything you type into the app — your name, your email address, the name of your shul — is stored only on your own phone and is never sent anywhere. What leaves your device is a pair of coordinates, a timezone and a date, carrying no name, no email and no account; and, when the app fails, a crash report, which is described in section 4.
We do not operate a server for the app. There is no database of users, because there is nothing to put in it. If the app crashes, a report describing the failure goes to Google’s Firebase Crashlytics, which processes it on our behalf; it carries no name, no email and no location.
The app is published by International Business Link, Corp., a Florida corporation trading as DigitalShul. Contact details are at the end of this page.
The app keeps the following in its own local storage on your phone:
None of this is transmitted to us or to anyone else. It is readable only by the app itself, and deleting the app deletes all of it.
Three routine requests, plus crash reporting, which has its own section below.
Hebcal — prayer time calculation. Receives your latitude, longitude, timezone and the date. Returns the day’s zmanim. Hebcal is a long-standing public Jewish calendar service; its own privacy policy governs what it does with the requests it receives.
Hebcal — Hebrew date conversion. Receives only the calendar date, and a flag saying whether nightfall has passed. No location is sent in this request at all. Returns the Hebrew date, the weekly parsha and any holiday.
BigDataCloud — place name lookup. Receives your latitude and longitude. Returns the name of the town you are in, so the app can show “Pembroke Pines” rather than a pair of decimals. This request is made only when your location changes, not each time you open the app.
None of these three requests carries your name, your email address, a device identifier, an advertising ID, or an account of any kind. Neither service can associate a request with you as a person, and neither is told who is asking.
When the app fails, we would rather know than not. From version 0.9.0 the app includes Firebase Crashlytics, a Google service that collects a report when the app crashes so the fault can be found and fixed. Without it, a report from someone using the app is “it closed”, which is not enough to act on.
What a crash report contains: the error and where in the code it happened, the model of your phone, its operating system version, the version of the app, the time, and the state of the device at that moment — memory, storage, orientation, whether the app was in the foreground. It also contains a random identifier that Firebase generates for each installation of the app.
What a crash report does not contain: your name, your email address, the name of your shul, your tradition, your coordinates or your place name. We attach no user identity to reports and have added no custom fields. The identifier in the report belongs to an installation of the app, not to you: it tells us that the same install crashed twice, not who you are.
When reports are sent. A report is written at the moment of the crash and uploaded the next time you open the app. If the app never crashes, no crash report is ever sent.
Firebase also registers the installation. Separately from crashes, the Firebase library contacts Google when the app starts, to register that installation and obtain the identifier described above. This means the app communicates with Google even on a day when nothing goes wrong. That request carries no personal information and no location.
Google processes this data on our behalf as our service provider, under Firebase’s own terms. Crash reports are kept for a limited period set by that service and are not used to advertise to you.
This is not usage analytics. Google Analytics and Firebase Analytics were deliberately declined when this was set up, and the app contains no analytics component. Nothing records which screens you visit, which zmanim you look at, how long you use the app or when you open it. The only thing that produces a report is a failure.
The app’s About screen offers our website, email address, telephone number and a WhatsApp button. Tapping one hands the request to your browser, mail app, dialler or WhatsApp, and you leave the app. Nothing is sent when you simply view that screen — only when you tap. Once you are in one of those apps, that app’s and that site’s own terms apply, not this policy.
The app asks for location permission because prayer times depend entirely on where you are: a few degrees of latitude moves sunrise by many minutes.
Granting it is optional. If you prefer not to, the app lets you pick your city from a built-in list or type coordinates by hand, and it works exactly the same afterwards. Approximate location is enough — the difference between precise and approximate changes the times by well under a minute.
Your position is used to calculate the times and to label the screen. It is not logged, not stored by us, not included in crash reports, and not used to build any picture of where you go.
Almost everything the app knows about you never leaves your device, so there is nothing for us to retain. Prayer times are cached on the phone for a short period so the app keeps working without a connection, and are cleared automatically once they are out of date.
The exception is crash reports, which Firebase holds for the limited period described in section 4 and then deletes automatically.
To delete everything on your side, uninstall the app. On Android you may also clear the app’s storage from the system settings. Uninstalling also ends the installation identifier — a later reinstall counts as a new installation, with no link to the previous one.
The app is a prayer-time reference intended for a general audience. It is not directed at children under 13, and it does not knowingly collect personal information from them. Nothing entered into the app is transmitted, and crash reports contain no personal information, so no child’s information reaches us.
Prayer times are computed from your position using published calculation methods, and are offered as a reference. For any question of practical halacha, and before relying on these times for a mitzvah with a fixed deadline, consult your Rav.
If the app begins handling information differently, this page will be updated before that version is released, and the date at the top will change. That is what happened here: version 0.9.0 added crash reporting, and this page was revised before that version reached anyone.
Email sales@digitalshul.com, telephone or WhatsApp +1 (954) 336-2511, or write to:
DigitalShul — International Business Link, Corp.
950 SW 138 Ave, Apt. B-112
Pembroke Pines, Florida 33027
United States
See also our Cookie Policy and Terms & Conditions.
