Most recovery apps compete on features. We compete on honesty. Every mechanic in P-Minus either has evidence behind it or says plainly that its grounding is the tradition. Here is what did not make the cut, and what we built instead.
These features are everywhere in this market. None of them carries evidence, and several work against recovery. They stay out, permanently.
| Feature | Common elsewhere | Why it is not in P-Minus |
|---|---|---|
| Content blockers | Built-in porn blockers and enforced device supervision. | Muraqabah is knowing that Allah sees you. Bolting a software watcher on top swaps the One who sees for a piece of code, and lets you feel guarded without being changed. The covenant only means something if it holds when nothing is checking. |
| Streaks and day counters | Real-time streaks, milestone badges, day counts front and centre. | A day count measures an absence, and counting an absence makes one slip the destruction of an achievement. That is the wrong shape for tawba. There is no direct evidence streaks help recovery; P-Minus tracks constancy instead, and a lapse never zeroes anything. |
| Growth visuals | A tree, garden, or avatar that grows with your progress. | Decoration that carries no evidence and turns the state of the heart into a score. There is no version of this that is more than decoration. |
| AI companions | A chatbot coach that reframes your thoughts on demand. | Conversational AI coaching is unevaluated anywhere in the treatment literature. We will not stand a chatbot in for the human accountability the evidence actually points to. |
| Leaderboards and clans | Community rankings, team competitions, public scores. | Competition mechanics imported from games, not from any treatment evidence. Shame is the thing most likely to make a person stop returning, so nothing in P-Minus ranks you against anyone. |
Other Muslim apps place Islamic content on top of secular mechanics. P-Minus rebuilds the foundation itself: the model of the person, the program spine, the theology.
| Question | Typical Muslim recovery app | P-Minus |
|---|---|---|
| Model of the person | A CBT calendar with Qur’an quotes layered on top. Islamic content decorating a secular mechanism. | We built the program on the classical model of the soul: nafs, qalb, aql, ruh. Every task is tagged to the aspect it works on. The anthropology is Islamized, not just the wallpaper. |
| Program spine | A 90 or 100 day "rewiring" calendar with no basis in any trial. | The Islamized twelve steps, the one spiritual format with a significant result against active comparators in controlled trials. |
| Evidence | Vendor self-reported success statistics, published nowhere peer-reviewed. | Every task carries an evidence label stating plainly whether its grounding is meta-analytic, trial-level, practitioner precedent, or tradition alone. |
| Theology | The AA and CBT framing left untouched underneath the Islamic wording. | Aqidah reshapes step one. Power belongs to Allah, so "powerless" is gone. Dhikr replaces meditation in step eleven. Huquq al-ibad, the rights of others, grounds step nine. |
| When you slip | The streak resets to zero and the app makes sure you feel it. | A mercy-forward tawba flow: renew your intention, log the trigger, resume your step. No reset, no demotion, no shaming copy. Defeat is only ceasing to return. |
The words that sell porn addiction apps, and what is actually behind them.
| The claim | What it actually means | What we do instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Brain rewiring" | Not a clinical term. No trial supports a fixed 90 or 100 day rewiring calendar; the number is a marketing choice, not a finding. | We name the mechanism each task uses and label the evidence behind it, at the level the evidence supports. |
| "CBT-based" | As a sticker, nothing. Any app can claim it when no technique is named and no evidence is attached to anything specific. | We use specific CBT and ACT techniques, and each one carries its own evidence label you can read. |
| "X% success rate" | Vendor self-report. The headline numbers in this market have no peer-reviewed evaluation behind them. | We claim only what controlled research supports, and say plainly when a practice is grounded in tradition rather than trials. |
| "AI coach" | A chatbot. Conversational AI coaching is unevaluated anywhere in the treatment literature; it is a delivery channel, not an intervention. | Human accountability: a partner, a group check-in, a mentor pathway. That is the active ingredient the twelve-step evidence identifies. |
| "Neuroscience-backed" | Dopamine talk is an explanation, not an intervention. Naming a neurotransmitter does not make a feature therapeutic. | We state what a mechanism does and how strong its evidence is, and we make no bigger claim than that. |
