Client project · iOS · Android · Flutter

Al-Burda البُردة الشريفة

A calm, fully offline Arabic reading and listening companion, shipped to the App Store and Google Play.

Role: Built from scratch as a solo project: Flutter app, Arabic RTL UI, iOS widget, audio, and App Store & Google Play release under my own account.
Status: Live on the App Store & Google Play
Stack: Flutter
Dart
Clean Architecture
Bloc
WidgetKit
Local notifications
Background audio

View on the App Store View on Google Play

The product

Al-Burda is a quiet companion for people who read or listen to the Burda of Imam al-Busiri. Readers open a gilded, verse-by-verse page, play a recitation, get a gentle verse reminder through the day, and see the verse of the day on their lock screen without opening the app.

My role

Built from scratch as a solo project for a client, from their requirements. I owned it end to end: the Flutter app and its architecture, the Arabic right-to-left UI, the native iOS lock-screen widget, audio and notifications, through to shipping it on the App Store and Google Play under my own developer account and every update since.

The hard part

A devotional app has to feel calm and trustworthy. That meant three hard constraints: it had to work with no internet connection, collect no data at all, and still feel alive through reminders, a lock-screen widget and audio that behaves properly around calls and Bluetooth devices.

Decisions and why

Fully on-device by design
No servers, no account and no analytics. Text, audio and progress live on the device, so the app works offline from first launch and the privacy promise is structural, not a policy line.
Clean Architecture with Bloc
Reading, audio, reminders and stats are separate features with their own state, which keeps the reader simple while the audio and reminder engines evolve independently.
Native where it matters
The lock-screen widget is built with WidgetKit so the verse of the day appears natively on iOS, alongside interactive notification cards for reminders.
Audio that respects the phone
A dedicated release focused on playback robustness: no overlap between the full recitation and verse clips, correct pausing during calls and Bluetooth route changes, and steadier lock-screen and background controls.

How the lock-screen widget gets its verses The Flutter app writes the verses through the home_widget package into an App Group (shared UserDefaults). The WidgetKit widget reads them from there, so the lock screen shows a verse even when the app is closed.

See a public sample of this pattern on GitHub (opens in a new tab)