For Kamran Mohammed , the idea to use ChatGPT to build an app for Muslim worship began with something deeply personal and frightening: a near-fatal accident that prompted him and his wife to reconnect with their faith. In 2023, Kamran and his wife, Summaiya Irum, were returning from their honeymoon in India when a driver he says was drunk sideswiped their car, flipping it. Hanging from his seat belt as smoke filled the car, Kamran feared they would die. He reached for his wife's hand and told her he loved her before strangers pulled them to safety.
Until then, Kamran had known little about his religion and sometimes barely prayed once a day. The crash changed his priorities. As he and his wife began learning more about Islam and trying to build consistent worship habits, he looked for apps to guide them. Instead, he found prayer times buried in advertisements, troubling questions about how some apps used personal data, and religious guidance that wasn't always clearly sourced.
Just as frustrating, many were written for people who already knew Islam inside out. He needed help learning the basics, not an avalanche of unfamiliar practices and names. Kamran wanted an open door for Muslims of any background. “Every app out there assumes that every Muslim is a pro,” he said.
The result is My Amaal, a free, ad-free app for iOS and Android named after his daughter. It tracks daily prayers and offers an illustrated, step-by-step guide to prayer. Users can listen to Qur’an recitations, read translations in English, Urdu, Indonesian or Spanish, and take a daily three-question quiz with sourced answers.
An Amazon software engineer in Austin, Texas, Kamran could code but lacked a design team to build a polished app in his spare time. “I always wanted to build something like this, but I wasn’t ever sure how to get started,” he said.
Kamran described the features he wanted, and Codex helped build and refine the interface. ChatGPT designed the logo and color palette and generated the prayer-guide illustrations on the first try.
Codex also pushed Kamran to follow the standards he had set for the app. When he suggested approving a saying of the Prophet Muhammad without checking it himself, Codex reminded him that he had promised to personally review religious material. It also questioned why a privacy-first worship app needed a login at all. The result: users can track their prayers without providing an email address or sending their worship history to a company server.
Two months after the crash, Kamran and Summaiya learned they were expecting their daughter. They now have a young son, too, and the app named for their daughter has a five-star average in Apple's App Store. As Kamran writes on its website: “I wanted an Islamic app I'd trust my own family with. I couldn't find it — so I built it, in the open.”
