Millions of Muslims around the globe celebrate the holy month of Ramadan each year by fasting from sunrise to sunset, reading more Quran, performing congregational pray in mosques, and of course, breaking their fast with families, friends, and neighbors. Undoubtedly, this year is different due to the spread of COVID-19, since people are forced to quarantine by staying at home and to abide by the restrictions on gathering with others to avoid getting any infection.
As the leading music streaming service in MENA, Anghami stands out to be the local platform in the region, understanding the users’ behavior during the holy month and offering them special features & add-ons to fulfill their religious needs using its developed technology — and a hint of creativity — to live Ramadan’s full journey with Anghami, at home.
Attention to details: starting simple
Anghami’s mobile user journey starts by tapping the app icon on any smartphone’s home screen. To make it more appealing to be tapped, the app’s icon changed for users in the region to have the look and feel of the holy month, by adding a crescent in the background which is by far the symbol of Ramadan, alongside a starry night as shown in the image below — unfortunately, due to some technical limitations, this is only available for iOS users.
Ramadan special features
As mentioned, some special Ramadan features are offered to Anghami users for the whole month; below is a brief explanation of each:
– Be religious, Stay entertained
Looking at the data, a large number of users are interested in religious/non-musical content during Ramadan, some of them don’t listen to any sort of music for the whole 30 days; therefore, a special explore page was created containing Ramadan related content only. A user can find religious/Islamic content on one hand and entertaining/educating content on the other.
As shown in the screenshots above, users can switch to the customized Ramadan explore page by changing the filter on top to “Ramadan”, to access a wide range of Ramadan related content:
- Religious and educational Podcasts
- Adeeyah & Anasheed
- Quran Juz’
- Ramadan Series soundtracks
- Cooking and Fasting tips: audio & video
- Curated playlists for everyone to enjoy: kids, youth, and adults
– Set alarms for sunrise and sunset times
Considering that people start fasting at sunrise and break it on sunset, Anghami shows its users both times in their specific location — with the ability to set an alarm on Android, which will play the Azan on sunset to indicate that it’s time to break the fast, and the voice of a Musaharati who traditionally beats a drum to wake people for suhur to eat their last meal of the day.
Setting an alarm is as simple as tapping on the Set Alarm button, then confirming the time with the ability to modify it upon request.
– Receive a daily Quran Juz’ narrated by a Quarii of your choice
Many Muslims tend to complete reading all the Juz’ of the Quran during Ramadan to get abundant rewards. In fact, our data show a high increase in searching for Quran content on Anghami since the first day of Ramadan, hence our curators divided the Noble Quran into 30 Juz’ for interested users to receive a daily Juz’ to complete it with Anghami.
2 simple steps to opt-in: when users open the app, they can tap on a special button redirecting to a WEB page where they are asked to choose a Quarii. After selecting the Quarii, the app will automatically notify the user daily whenever it’s time to listen to today’s daily Juz’.
A month full of quiet; and respect.
Given that users listening to Quran and religious content on Anghami need to be fully focused on the audio coming from the app, ads were removed & content was ingested in high quality for everyone, including not subscribed users, for this specific genre to give them a better-uninterrupted experience.
Comms: adapting to COVID-19 restrictions
Last year, Anghami released a Ramadan jingle that was shared on its social media accounts and aired on TV; the lyrics of the jingle ends with “the gathering goes longer and the group goes bigger” (translated from Arabic), which cannot be used this year for obvious “COVID-19″ reasons.
This year, Anghami released a special soft oriental song for Ramadan, and made sure to adapt to the current times by adding lyrics like “…safe at home…” to it, in addition to exploring the joy, love, and happiness that Ramadan spread in people’s hearts.
And of course, there’s a video that’s shared everywhere to explain briefly how a user can enjoy Ramadan on Anghami:
Users are satisfied ✔️
Straight after rolling out the Ramadan features in-app, users started giving their feedback about them — hopefully, you’ll enjoy some of the tweets from our happy users as much as we did:
And @anghami is killing it this #RamadanMubarak as usual by being relevant, not doing what everyone and their mother is… Which is being all over none of their business. God knows how many times I tried to convince clients to buy into their platform but I was talking to walls.
Anghami’s new look for ramadan
Anghami got you covered
There is no doubt that this year’s Ramadan is like no other; a lot of changes are happening and no one knows when it’s going to end. Anghami offers the mentioned above for the users to go along with them throughout their Ramadan days from crescent to crescent without needing to go outside the quarantine.
#StayHome & live Ramadan with Anghami.
By Wael Hourani Product Manager, Anghami