Counting Down to Ramadan and Eid on iPhone with the Hijri Calendar
Why a Ramadan countdown set in a normal calendar app is wrong by eleven days next year, how Hijri-anchored countdowns roll forward on their own, and why moon sighting means a calculated date can be a day out.
Why last year's date is no use this year
The Islamic calendar is lunar. Twelve lunar months run about eleven days shorter than a Gregorian year, so Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, the Islamic New Year, and the Day of Arafah all move roughly eleven days earlier each Gregorian year. A countdown you created against a fixed Gregorian date is correct once and quietly wrong forever after.
That is why most people end up looking the date up again every single year, and why a repeating yearly reminder in a standard calendar app is worse than nothing — it will confidently tell you the wrong day.
Anchor the countdown to the Hijri date instead
The fix is to store the event as a Hijri date — the first of Ramadan, the first of Shawwal, the tenth of Dhul Hijjah — rather than as a Gregorian one. The app then works out the next occurrence for you and, once the day passes, rolls straight forward to next year's.
This has to be handled in the data model, not as a display option. An app that merely shows a Hijri date next to a Gregorian one has not solved anything: the underlying event is still pinned to a Gregorian day and will drift. The test is simple — set a Ramadan countdown, let it pass, and see whether it points at next year on its own.
Calculated dates and moon sighting
Any app can only ever show a calculated date. The start of an Islamic month traditionally depends on the sighting of the new crescent, and authorities in different countries may announce the same month a day apart — so a calculated date can legitimately differ by a day from the one announced where you live.
The honest way to handle this is to say so, show the calculated date, and let you shift a Hijri countdown by a day when your local announcement arrives. An app that presents a calculated date as authoritative is overstating what it knows.
Right-to-left is not a translation setting
Arabic support in this category is usually bulk translation with a mirrored layout, and it tends to break in exactly the place that matters: the big number. Digits, day labels, progress rings, and widget layouts all have to be laid out right-to-left properly, and a widget is a fixed frame with no room to hide a mistake.
Worth checking before you commit to an app: does the Arabic read like someone wrote it, and does every widget family — not just the app screen — lay out correctly?
Where Soon fits
Soon treats Hijri as a real calendar rather than a display filter, so Hijri-anchored countdowns roll forward automatically each year. Ready-made countdowns are included for Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, the Islamic New Year, and the Day of Arafah, and any countdown can be adjusted by a day to match your local announcement.
Arabic is written rather than machine-translated and runs right-to-left throughout the app and on every widget. All of it is free — Arabic and Hijri support are never part of Soon Pro. See the Soon product page for screenshots and the full privacy policy.