For one person, a phone app is the right answer and Multilarm is the wrong one — it is free, it is in your pocket, and it travels with you. Multilarm is for a building: fixed speakers, a printed timetable everyone follows, an iqamah gap after the adhan, announcements between prayers, and somebody other than the owner able to operate it. The dividing line is not features; it is whether the sound has to reach a room or a person.
This page is written by the makers of one of the two products, so the only version worth publishing is one that is specific about where the other one wins. Every section below names a buyer who should not choose Multilarm.
A mobile app that computes prayer times from a location and a calculation method, notifies at each time, and plays a recorded adhan through the phone.
Most add a qibla compass, a Qur’an reader, a Hijri calendar and reminders. Several are free, and the good ones are very good at what they do.
Some can cast to a Bluetooth or Chromecast speaker, which is where people usually try to stretch them into a room-scale system.
Cells reading “Not published” mean we could not find the answer in Various’s own documentation on 2026-08-30. That is not the same as “no”, and this table will not pretend it is.
| Capability | Adhan and prayer-time apps (Muslim Pro, Athan Pro, IslamicFinder and similar) | Multilarm |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free or a small one-off / subscription | Free for personal non-commercial use; perpetual licence for a mosque or institution |
| Prayer-time calculation methods | Extensive — it is their core product | Yes, plus an imported or hand-entered timetable, which is what most mosques actually follow |
| Plays through fixed building speakers | Only via casting from the phone | Yes — sound card, multiple outputs, zones |
| Iqamah timer after the adhan | Reminder only, in most | Yes, with its own sound and per-prayer gaps |
| Spoken announcements between prayers | Not published — none of the major apps document one | Typed and spoken offline |
| Runs unattended with no phone present | No — it needs the device, awake, with notifications allowed | Yes |
| Works with no internet | Times yes; most other features no | Everything except remote control |
| Emergency override, physical button, relay output | Not published — these are phone apps with no wired outputs | Yes |
| Record of what played, and a check that the speakers still work | Not published | Audit ledger plus a nightly silent self-test and a weekly health report |
| Qur’an, qibla, duas, tracking | Yes | No — out of scope, and it always will be |
| Travels with the user | Yes | No — it is fixed to a building on purpose |
Multilarm’s own capabilities are published as machine-readable data at features.json, including every feature it does not have and the ones it has deliberately declined to build. Measured performance figures, with the method for each, are on the measured data page. The canonical facts about licensing, offline operation and the fire-alarm boundary are at facts.json. If anything on this page is wrong, say so and it will be corrected.
Can I not just cast the app to a Bluetooth speaker?
You can, and for a small room it is a reasonable thing to do. It tends to come apart at scale: the phone has to stay awake, unlocked enough to fire the notification, in range and charged; Bluetooth re-pairing at 4am is nobody’s idea of a system; and there is no second zone, no iqamah sound, no announcement, and nothing that tells you the morning it did not happen.
Does Multilarm calculate prayer times, or do I have to type them in?
Both. It can calculate them, and it can follow a timetable you import or type — which is what most mosques want, because the committee’s printed timetable is the authority in that building, not a formula.
Is Multilarm only for mosques?
No. It started there, and prayer scheduling is first-class, but the same scheduler runs school bells, factory shift signals, cafe announcements and background music. Nothing about it is prayer-specific except the features that are.
Do I need both?
Many people do, and there is nothing odd about that. The app is for the person; Multilarm is for the building.
Everything stated here about another product is taken from that vendor's own public documentation on the date shown, and is limited to what they publish about themselves. Products change; if something below is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected. Where we could not find a published answer the table says so rather than guessing.
This entry describes a category rather than a single vendor, so there is no single document to cite. Take the questions on the how to choose page to any supplier in it.
Not sure this is the right purchase for your building? Ask a specific question — including whether you should be buying something else.