Wee Pray – Pray with me - Muslim Friendly Apps

Wee Pray – Pray with me Oct 21, 2011

On first glance, this app looks like an exclusively Christian app. I hadn’t paid it much attention before because of that, however when I was asked to review it, I took a closer look at the review videos and saw that it could easily be adapted to work for a Muslim (or even non religious) family. I decided not to tag this as “No Religion” because it is intended as an (albeit non denominational) religious app and there are religious messages in it’s name, imagery and default settings, however this app can be used in a variety of ways, religious or otherwise.

How it works is you set up 6 profiles (family members, friends or even a different profile for different days), you can use a custom image for the profile and then record 4 different audio messages (or prayers if you’re using the app with it’s original intention).

When you open the app you’re greeted by an adorable baby with it’s hands held in the ‘prayer’ position. Set up your profiles by double tapping on ‘Set Up’ (it’s pretty straight forward and you set up all the profiles in one place). There is also an Email setting which you can use to send image and audio messages via email from the app.

Touch the baby and it takes you to your list of profiles (pic below). It doesn’t appear to support less or more than the default 6 profiles, so if you don’t have 6 ways to fill it you’ll have default settings on the remaining profiles. Turning off excess profiles might be a feature we’d like in future but in the mean time you can leave them as default or find ways to fill them. We have a combination of photo’s chosen from our own photo library on the iPad and default images that come with the app (the robots on 4 and 6), you can also take a photo with your devices camera directly from the app. Below the profile images are the bears which are used to play the audio on the individual profiles, if you touch a bear it will take you to a page with all it’s messages from every profile (so the ‘Love’ bear will take you to a page with the ‘Love’ messages from every profile).

Touch a profile image and it takes you to the profile page. On this page you can touch the bears to hear the 4 audio messages. Below is the profile I set up for myself. I’ve stayed fairly true to the apps original intention but recorded Muslim prayers for Morning, Night and Meal time and then a little message on the ‘Love’ bear. The labels on the bears can’t be customized (I think this would be a great addition in future versions! That way the bears can be labeled in other languages or even labeled to be more specific to how the app is being used). If you haven’t recorded a message, you can touch the bears on a profile and it plays the default audio. The default audio files are Christian prayers, and mention ‘Lord’ and use ‘Amen’ to end, otherwise they are non denominational and I’d even go as far as saying they can be relevant and appropriate for Muslim or otherwise non Christian families.

We have a lot of family (grandparents, great grandparents, aunts & cousins) overseas who we don’t get to see or talk to often, our kids can often feel distant from their family and miss them, so this sort of app has great potential for this. There are so many different circumstances in which it can be useful, parents who work late or have to be away from home for periods of time, teaching kids the words to prayers (such as the Muslim sleeping and waking prayers), I’m sure there are endless different ways families can use it. Definitely recommend.

In Short

Wee Pray - Pray with Me is a unique, highly flexible app that can be used to help children who are missing family members or to remind or teach routines or prayers for different times of day. We love it for it's huge potential.