There are probably three hundred Quran apps in the iOS App Store and another hundred web apps. So when I tell people I built one from scratch, the first question is always the same: why?
The honest answer is that I spent a week looking for a Quran web app I would actually want to use every day, and I couldn't find one. Not because they didn't exist — there were plenty. But each one had something wrong with it.
The most popular ones were cluttered. Ads between Surahs. Pop-up banners asking you to install the Android app. A sidebar with news and fatwas and Islamic finance links. I just wanted to read the Quran.
Some had good reading interfaces but no audio. Some had audio but only one reciter. Some had multiple reciters but the audio would stop between ayahs and I'd have to click again for the next one. Continuous recitation, apparently, was a premium feature.
A few had Bangla translation — which matters to me, and to the people I was building this for — but the Bangla text was an image, not selectable text. I couldn't copy a verse to share.
And almost none of them had what I'd call a proper typography experience. The Arabic text was too small, or in a font that didn't render harakat properly on certain screens. The English translation was in a default sans-serif with no line-height consideration for reading long passages.
So I made a list. Not a feature backlog or a product spec — just a plain list of things that were wrong. It had fourteen items.
Then I looked at the list and thought: this is about eight weeks of work. I'd been using Next.js for my other projects. Al-Quran Cloud has a free, public API. The Amiri font is on Google Fonts. And I had a Vercel account.
I started on a Saturday morning with a blank Next.js project and a cup of tea.
The first thing I built was the Surah list. Fetch from the API, render a card per Surah with its number, Arabic name, English name, English meaning, and revelation type. I spent more time than I expected on the card layout — the right balance of information density. Too little and the page feels empty. Too much and you're just staring at a wall of text before you've even opened a Surah.
The first working version took three days. It had no audio, no translations, no dark mode. Just a list of 114 Surahs you could click on to see the Arabic text.
My wife opened it on her phone, read Surah Al-Fatiha, and said: "This is nice. It's clean. Where's the audio?"
That became the second week.
What started as a project to scratch my own itch turned into something I actually use every day. The Du'a & Remembrance page was my mother's suggestion — she wanted the 99 Names with Bangla meanings somewhere she could access quickly.
I don't know if Tilawa will ever have a hundred thousand users. But I know it's the Quran app I wanted to use. And that, it turns out, is a good enough reason.
Mustafa Kamal Hossain
Founder & Principal Engineer at Manfi. Passionate about Laravel, SaaS architecture, and high-performance engineering.