Open two different prayer-time apps and you will often see Fajr or Isha a few minutes apart. Neither is broken. The gap comes from the calculation method — a choice about how the edges of twilight are measured. Here is what the common methods mean, and how to pick the right one.
Most prayer times are not in dispute
Several of the daily moments come straight from the sun's position at your coordinates, and every method agrees on them:
- Dhuhr — when the sun crosses the meridian (its highest point).
- Asr — when an object's shadow reaches a set length (more on this below).
- Maghrib — sunset.
- Sunrise (syuruq) — which closes the Fajr window.
Because these are pure astronomy, a good app computes them the same way everywhere. The disagreement is only about Fajr and Isha.
Fajr and Isha: it is all about the twilight angle
Fajr begins at dawn and Isha at nightfall — but dawn and nightfall are gradual. Astronomers define them by how far the sun sits below the horizon, called the depression angle. Different authorities settled on slightly different angles, and that is the entire source of the few-minute gap:
- Muslim World League (MWL) — Fajr 18°, Isha 17°. The common international default.
- ISNA (North America) — 15° / 15°.
- Umm al-Qura (Saudi Arabia) — Fajr 18.5°, and Isha as a fixed 90 minutes after Maghrib (120 in Ramadan), not an angle.
- University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi — 18° / 18°. Common across South Asia.
- Egyptian General Authority — 19.5° / 17.5°.
- Kemenag (Indonesia) — 20° / 18°.
A wider angle means the sun has to sink further, so Fajr comes a little earlier and Isha a little later. That is the whole few-minute spread.
Asr: a madhab choice, not a method
Asr has two mainstream opinions, and both are valid:
- Standard (Shafi'i, Maliki, Hanbali) — Asr begins when an object's shadow equals its own length.
- Hanafi — when the shadow equals twice the object's length, so Asr falls later.
This is not about geography; it follows the school you or your community follow.
So which method should you use?
The right method is the one your local mosque and community follow — because you pray alongside them. In Indonesia that is Kemenag; across much of the world MWL is the standard default; the Gulf uses Umm al-Qura. The goal is not to match "whatever another app shows" — it is to match your community.
How Five Prayers A Day handles it
For Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, the app uses each country's official published times — no guesswork. Everywhere else, it computes your times for your exact location and labels the method plainly ("Computed · Muslim World League", and so on), so you always know which convention you are seeing. You can switch the method and the Asr school in settings if your community uses a different one.
One honest note, as always: an app is a helper, not an authority. Where the app and your local mosque disagree, follow your mosque.