About qibla.uk
What this is
A qibla compass for the United Kingdom that runs in a browser. It reads your position and your device’s compass, works out the great-circle bearing to the Kaaba, corrects the reading from magnetic to true north, and draws the result. There is nothing to install and no account to make.
It is deliberately one thing rather than a suite. Prayer times, calendars and mosque listings are all worth having and none of them are here, because a tool that answers one question in five seconds is a different product from an app you open every day.
Why it exists
Every qibla app has the same review, written a thousand times: it points somewhere different each time you open it. Some of that is unavoidable — a phone magnetometer is a cheap sensor surrounded by metal and magnets. But a good part of it is avoidable, and is avoided by nobody: the difference between magnetic and true north, which is a systematic error, not noise, and which most tools simply do not correct for.
The other half of the problem is that tools hide their uncertainty. An arrow drawn with total confidence on a phone whose compass has just been sitting next to a laptop is not an honest answer. This one shows the correction it applied and says so when the reading cannot be trusted.
What it will not do
No adverts, no account, and no request for your location that outlives the visit. Your coordinates are used on your own device and never reach a server — the privacy page sets out exactly what happens to them.
There is one thing it does do: count visits, with Google Analytics, and only if you agree to it when asked. Nothing is written to your device unless you do, and the advertising signals are switched off whatever you answer. It is here to tell us whether any of this is useful to anyone — which is a question worth being able to answer, and not one worth tracking people over.
It will also not tell you it is accurate to a tenth of a degree in your hand. The arithmetic is that precise; the sensor underneath it is not, and the difference between those two things has a page of its own.
How it is paid for
It is not. The site costs very little to run and currently earns nothing, which is the honest position and the reason there are no adverts. If that changes it will be said here rather than discovered.
Corrections
If a bearing here disagrees with one you trust, that is worth knowing about — particularly if you can say where you were standing and what the other source was. The calculation is written out in full on the method page so that a disagreement can be traced rather than argued about.
Corrections, and anything else: there is a message box on the contact page, or [email protected] if you would rather write an email.