Halachic Times

What Halachic Times is for

If you need to know when to daven, when the Shema closes or when to light candles, Halachic Times puts those times on one screen. It is aimed at people who keep to halachic timings rather than simply civil sunrise and sunset. The app is built around a set of halachic times, and it also shows the reasoning behind them.

The times are worked out from where you are. The app uses an internet connection to find your nearest address. If that is not available, it falls back to the nearest country or time zone, so the figures will be less precise. The developer lists this fallback as part of how the calculation works.

Halachic Times groups its times by how often they recur: daily, weekly, monthly and annual. The sections below follow that grouping.

Daily prayer and Shema times

The daily list runs from dawn through to the Morning Guard. It covers the earliest time for tallis and tefillin (misheyakir), the latest time for Shema and for shacharis, midday (chatzos hayom), and the earliest and latest afternoon prayer times, mincha gedola and mincha ketana. Plug hamincha, sunset, twilight, nightfall, midnight and the two Guard times are also included.

The seasonal hour is listed among the daily times as well, so you can see how long an hour is on a given day. Each time is calculated for the location the app has determined, so the same day can show different figures in different places.

Shabbat, monthly and festival dates

Weekly, the app shows candle lighting, which falls before sunset on Fridays and after Shabbat on a festival that follows Shabbat. It also shows when Shabbat ends. These are the two times most people look up each week.

Each month it gives the molad, along with the earliest and latest times for kiddush levana. Across the year it covers the latest time to eat chametz before Pesach, which the listing says is the same as latest shacharis, and the latest time to burn chametz on Erev Pesach. It also gives the number of Channukah candles for a given evening, the start and end of fasts, the count for sefirat haOmer, and the end of festivals.

Seeing the opinions behind each time

Tapping any time opens a list of the known opinions about it. This is the feature that sets Halachic Times apart from a plain sunrise table. Where authorities differ on a time, you can see the different views side by side rather than a single figure.

The calculations are drawn from a Calendar library by KosherJava, which the developer credits in the listing.

Compass and reminders

The compass utility has a pink line that points towards the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. The developer advises holding the device horizontally for best results. This is useful for working out the direction of prayer from wherever you are.

You can also set repeating notifications to remind you of an upcoming time. The listing does not say how far ahead a reminder can be set, so check the app's own settings for the options it gives you.