2 Best APIs for Prayer-Times in Nigeria

Islamic Calendar API by Aladhan provides comprehensive tools for converting between Gregorian and Hijri Islamic dates, retrieving accurate Islamic prayer times for any location worldwide, and building Muslim-focused applications that respect the lunar-based Islamic calendar system. The Aladhan API is one of the most widely used free Islamic APIs globally, supporting mosques, Muslim lifestyle apps, Islamic school platforms, and prayer reminder applications across the world, including Nigeria which has a Muslim population exceeding 90 million people across its northern states and throughout the country. The Hijri calendar conversion endpoints allow converting any Gregorian date to its Hijri equivalent and vice versa, supporting the calculation of Islamic dates for any year past or future. Nigerian Muslim app developers can use this conversion to display dual-calendar interfaces in apps — showing both the standard Gregorian date and the corresponding Hijri date simultaneously. This is particularly important for Nigerian Muslims observing Islamic events like Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Mawlid al-Nabi, and the Islamic New Year, all of which are determined by the Hijri calendar. Prayer times are calculated for any location by providing latitude and longitude coordinates (or a city name) along with the desired calculation method. Multiple calculation methods are supported including the Muslim World League method, Egyptian General Authority of Survey method, University of Islamic Sciences Karachi method, Umm Al-Qura University Makkah method, and others — allowing Nigerian Muslim communities to use whichever method their religious authority follows. Nigerian mosques in cities like Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, Maiduguri, and Lagos can build prayer time boards or digital displays powered by the Aladhan API. Specific Islamic dates and special calendar events are accessible through the API, including the dates of Ramadan for any year, the Islamic New Year (1st Muharram), and other significant months in the Islamic year. For Nigerian Islamic calendar app developers building annual event planners for Muslim communities, the ability to programmatically retrieve accurate Islamic dates for upcoming years allows generating multi-year Islamic event calendars without manual date calculation. The Qibla direction endpoint calculates the direction of Mecca (Qibla) from any geographic coordinates, returning the compass bearing in degrees. Nigerian Muslim app developers building mosque finder or prayer direction apps can integrate Qibla direction calculation to help Muslims identify the correct prayer direction from their current location anywhere in Nigeria, whether in the northern states near Niger and Chad or the southern coastal regions. Special Islamic dates endpoint provides dates for Laylat al-Qadr (the Night of Power during Ramadan) and other significant nights, supporting Nigerian Islamic apps that send notifications or provide special content for these important spiritual occasions. Prayer notification apps serving Nigerian Muslims can use these dates to configure automated reminders for these nights. The Aladhan API is entirely free with no authentication required, making it immediately accessible for Nigerian Muslim app developers, mosque management software developers, and Islamic school platform builders. The API handles millions of requests monthly and has proven reliable at scale, making it suitable for production applications serving large Nigerian Muslim user bases. Nigerian Muslim community developers can call the Aladhan API endpoints without any API key by default, with optional registration for higher request volumes.

Al Adhan Prayer Times API is a free, comprehensive Islamic prayer time calculation service providing accurate daily prayer schedules for any location worldwide, including all cities and geographic coordinates across Nigeria. With Nigeria being a country with approximately 100 million Muslim citizens — one of the largest Muslim populations in the world — accurate prayer time calculation is a fundamental requirement for a wide range of Nigerian mobile apps, websites, and digital services serving Muslim communities. Al Adhan solves this cleanly with a zero-cost, zero-setup API. The five daily Islamic prayers (Fajr at dawn, Dhuhr at midday, Asr in the afternoon, Maghrib at sunset, and Isha at night) are calculated based on the sun's position relative to the observer's geographic location. Prayer times vary by location and change every day throughout the year as the sun's position shifts with the seasons. Manual calculation requires astronomical formulas, and different global Islamic authorities use slightly different calculation methods (different angles for Fajr and Isha). Al Adhan implements all major calculation methods and exposes them through a simple query parameter, allowing Nigerian developers to match the calculation method preferred by local Islamic authorities. Nigeria's geography spans multiple latitudes from south (Lagos at approximately 6°N) to north (Sokoto, Maiduguri at approximately 13°N), creating meaningful differences in prayer times between northern and southern Nigeria. The summer/winter variation in day length is also more pronounced in the north. Al Adhan handles these geographic differences correctly — an Abuja user and a Kano user querying the same API get different, location-appropriate prayer times. The API accepts either a city name plus country code or geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude), accommodating both named city queries and precise GPS-based lookups for rural Nigerian locations not in the city database. Supported calculation methods include the Muslim World League (MWL), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Egyptian General Authority of Survey, Umm Al-Qura University (Mecca), University of Islamic Sciences Karachi, Institute of Geophysics University of Tehran, Gulf Region, Kuwait, Qatar, Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura, Union Organization Islamic de France, Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Turkey, Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia, and Moonsighting Committee Worldwide. For Nigerian Muslims, the Muslim World League (MWL) method is commonly used in the north, though local mosques may prefer other methods. The API supports all of these through the method parameter. The daily prayer times response includes: Fajr, Sunrise, Dhuhr, Asr, Sunset, Maghrib, Isha, Imsak (pre-Fajr time), Midnight, and Firstthird/Lastthird of the night — more data than most applications need, but developers select the fields relevant to their use case. The response also includes the current Hijri (Islamic calendar) date alongside the Gregorian date, useful for displaying Islamic dates in apps, noting Islamic months like Ramadan, and scheduling Ramadan-specific features automatically. Monthly and yearly timetable endpoints return prayer times for an entire month or year in a single API call, avoiding the need for daily API requests. Nigerian apps generating printed prayer timetables, mosque bulletin boards, or calendar exports use these endpoints to generate complete schedules efficiently. The Qibla API returns the precise compass bearing toward the Kaaba in Mecca from any geographic coordinate. For a user in Lagos, this is approximately 71°NE; for Kano in northern Nigeria, approximately 68°NE; for Maiduguri in the northeast, approximately 63°NE. Providing Qibla direction is a standard feature in Islamic prayer apps, and Al Adhan's Qibla endpoint makes this trivial to implement. No API key, no account, no credit card, no rate limit documentation — Al Adhan is entirely open for use. For Nigerian developers building any application serving Muslim users, this API eliminates the engineering cost of implementing prayer time calculations from scratch (which requires implementing astronomical algorithms) while providing higher accuracy than simplified calculations and flexibility across all Nigerian geographic locations.