Frequently asked questions

An iPhone or iPad running iOS 18.6 or later. The layout adapts to iPad, and both orientations work.

Mawtini is free. There are no advertisements, no in-app purchases and no subscriptions. Nothing is locked, no part of the atlas is held back, and there is nothing to buy later.

No. There is no sign-up, no login and no email required. Open the app and play.

Yes — completely. Every map, name, history and sound ships inside the app. Gameplay makes no network requests at all. The only screen that ever reaches the network is Settings → More apps, which asks Apple for the icons of the developer's other apps.

You are shown a village's name and a hand-drawn map of its region. Tap where the village belongs. You have five lives per attempt; a wrong tap costs one. Points depend on how close you were, and finishing with lives left adds a bonus. The guide walks through it in detail.

No. Running out ends that attempt only. Every village you had already placed stays placed, and you can start the region again straight away.

Yes, as often as you like — to raise a score or to ace it. Replaying can only improve your record; it never removes anything you had earned.

It narrows down where the village is. It costs a fifth of that village's points, so it is worth using when you are genuinely stuck rather than as a habit.

Each map is divided into territories, one per village, and your tap has to land inside the right one. Where villages sat close together, their territories are correspondingly small. Zooming in before you tap helps.

One village a day, the same for every player, chosen by the date. Playing it each day builds a streak. Missing a day resets the streak and costs nothing else.

Touch and hold an empty area of your Home Screen until the icons jiggle, tap the + in the corner, search for Mawtini, and add it. It shows the day's village and whether you have played it.

Settings → Language inside the app opens the iOS settings page for Mawtini, where you can set the language for this app alone without changing the rest of your phone. The app reopens in the language you chose, with right-to-left layout in Arabic.

Yes. Settings → Numerals lets you pick 0123 or ٠١٢٣ independently of the language. Auto simply follows the language.

Transliterating Arabic place names into Latin script has no single correct answer, and the same village is written several different ways in different sources. Mawtini follows the spellings used by PalestineRemembered.com so that the app agrees with the archive it draws on, and stores alternate spellings so that search still finds the place whichever form you type. If a name is genuinely wrong rather than merely different, please tell me.

Because none could be confirmed. Histories are matched to villages by agreement on the Arabic name, and a match that cannot be established is left empty rather than filled with a plausible guess. A modern settlement built on a village's land is never allowed to supply that village's story. Roughly 600 of the 1,025 places currently carry a written history; the rest carry their name, their district and their place on the map.

Village names, district groupings and the traced maps come from PalestineRemembered.com. Histories, populations and depopulation dates come from Wikipedia (text under CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0). Every village page carries a "Learn more" link back to its source.

Please send it to mawtini@qraiqe.no with the village name and, if you can, a source. Corrections ship with the next content update. This matters more to me than any feature request.

Because the villages in it are recorded against those districts, on maps drawn by hand at that time. Placing them on a modern map would put them somewhere they never were. The app is an atlas of what was recorded, not a statement drawn on a current map.

That the village was depopulated and destroyed. It is shown as a plain fact, in the atlas and on the village page. It is never a scoring bonus, never a reward, and never accompanied by celebration in the app.

On your device. If you are signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive on, it also syncs through your own private iCloud database so your other devices stay in step. That database belongs to your Apple Account — the developer cannot read it, and there is no server of mine anywhere in the picture.

Check that both devices are signed in to the same Apple Account with iCloud Drive enabled, and that Mawtini is allowed to use iCloud in iOS Settings → your name → iCloud. Sync runs in the background and can take a few minutes; opening the app on both devices while they have a connection usually settles it.

Deleting the app removes the copy on that device. To clear the synced copy as well, turn Mawtini off in iOS Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage before reinstalling. See Your Privacy Choices for the exact steps.

No. There is no analytics framework, no advertising identifier, no crash reporter and no third-party SDK of any kind in the app. Apple's privacy label for Mawtini is Data Not Collected. The Privacy Policy spells out the whole picture.

Yes. Screens are labelled for VoiceOver, text scales with Dynamic Type, Reduce Motion replaces every animation with a calm variant, and Reduce Transparency swaps blurred backdrops for solid colour. If something is unreachable for you, that is a bug worth reporting — please write.

Settings → Sound turns off the anthem and all effects together.