Everything it does. In one place.

Absences and family messages were two pages, and the bell at the top emptied as soon as you glanced at it. There is now one Inbox, and Absence notices has folded into it.

If you use the app from your phone's home screen, the emailed sign-in link kept opening in your browser instead, and the app itself stayed signed out. That is how iPhones treat links, and no setting changes it. So the email now brings a 6-digit code: type it into the app you are holding and you are in.

Messages worked a child at a time, and it made you name a Subject before you could write a word. A family with three children became three conversations, and a question about Friday pickup needed a title first. Messages is now one chat with the family, the way you would talk to them on a phone, and the Subject box has gone.

Staff chat and parent messages were two pages, two unread counts and two places to look. They are now one Messages page: notices at the top, then families, then staff, with one search across all three and one badge telling you something is waiting.

A teacher's diary page was a form: fields to fill, a save button, and nothing to suggest a parent was on the other end of it. It is now a chat, one per child. Tonight's homework goes out as a message, the family's reply comes back underneath it, and the photo or recording they sent sits in the thread where you would expect to find it.

The office home page was eleven tiles of equal size in the order they happened to get written, and the teacher's was a greeting sitting on top of four long reports. Both have been rebuilt on one design and ordered by what a person can do something about: today's hours, the things waiting on a decision, the class you are about to teach with its register on it, then the numbers.

Most Maktabs teach more than one thing, and the fields that suit a Qaidah class are not the fields that suit an evening Islamic Studies programme. Everyone used to share one set. You can now build several diary designs, name them, and point each one at the programmes and classes it belongs to.

A parent opening the diary had to work out what tonight's homework was from a list of days. The page answers that first now: what the class has been set, what has been set just for their child, the teacher's note and anything sent with it, all at the top. Saying you have seen it is one tap.

Homework set for a whole class was text only, so a worksheet or a recitation had to travel some other way. You can now attach a photo or a voice note while you are writing it, and every family in the class gets it with the homework.

The application form was thirty fields on one long scroll, one child per go, and a parent who tapped Sign up on a particular programme arrived at a blank form with that programme forgotten. It is now a set of short steps with a progress bar: the children, then a programme for each of them, then the address, then health and consent, then a review before anything is sent.

Opening a child gave a teacher two different navigations: a grid of tiles at the bottom of the overview, and a row of tabs on every other page. The sections now sit in one panel down the left on every page, so you can move between diary, attendance, notes, merits, tests, pathway and hifdh without going back first.

Setting tonight's homework and working out what you still had to mark meant going class by class through the register. There is now a Homework tab with a row for each class you teach: tonight's homework on the line underneath, how many children you have marked on the right, and an amber dot on anything not set yet.

A class that has not been given a name of its own is described by its teacher, subject and days, and that description was reaching parents. Some schools are happy with that and some are not, so it is your decision now. Under Settings you choose one of four: the class name, the teacher's name, both, or nothing.

Correcting somebody's hours meant going to Finance and finding them inside a payroll week. Their staff page now carries a Timesheets card: this week, this month and last month as totals, the individual sign-ins underneath, and an edit on each row.

Families think in monthly amounts. The programme form takes one now, £40 a month over ten months, instead of making you work backwards to a weekly rate that happens to reach the same total. Pricing by weeks is still there for anyone who charges that way.

Terms are not the same length and plenty of Maktabs price them accordingly: £120 for the autumn, £110 for the spring, £100 for the summer. The year used to have to be one figure split evenly. You can now type each term's own amount and the year is the sum of them.

The diary asked every Maktab the same questions, which is why so many of them were writing the real record in a general notes box. Under Settings you can now name up to seven fields of your own (Qaidah, Duas, Islamic Studies, whatever you actually mark) and say for each one whether it is rated, whether it takes a written comment, and whether parents see it.

Most homework is set for everybody, and it was being typed onto each child in turn. You can write it once for the class now. Marking has a grid to match: children down the side, your own fields across the top, one tap to a mark, and a fill-the-column button that only touches the cells you have not already done by hand.

The payroll page worked every week out from today's rates. That is right for a week you are about to pay and wrong for one you paid in April: put somebody's rate up and last spring's totals quietly went up with it. Marking a period paid now takes a copy of it, the hours, the rates and the amounts, and that copy is what you see from then on.

A programme running weekday evenings and Saturday mornings could only be given one pair of times, so one of them was wrong wherever it appeared. You can now add a second set of times for a different group of days, and it reads as Monday to Friday 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm, Saturday 9:00 am to 11:00 am, on the website and everywhere else.

Filling a class meant opening each child and enrolling them one at a time. There is an Add students button on the class itself now: search, tick the ones you want, save. Every name tells you before you tick it whether that child is already in another class for the same subject.

Most sessions, nearly everyone is in, and taking the register meant tapping Present twenty-five times to say so. There's now one button at the top of the register that marks every unmarked student present at once. You still look down the list, change anyone who isn't there, and save as normal.

Teachers can now attach a resource to any homework: a passage that opens on Quran.com at the right ayahs, or a read-along playlist. You pick it from your Maktab’s own shelf, so there are no links to paste and nowhere for a child to end up that nobody chose. And you can record a voice note that goes home with the homework. A teacher reading the line the way it should sound is worth more than a sentence describing it.

Until now, replying to homework meant typing. From today a parent can send back a photo of the page their child worked on, or record them reading it aloud straight from the phone, with nothing to install and no email to anyone. A teacher who set a Qaida page can now hear how the letters were actually read, which is the part a written note was never going to carry.

Parents can now be told the moment something happens, instead of having to remember to check. Turn notifications on once, and the app will let you know when a new programme opens for signups, when your application has been decided, when a teacher posts to the homework diary, and when the Maktab sends a message about your child.

Hifdh now has its own place in the app, separate from the homework diary. Teachers record what a student recited in the sitting and tap any word to mark a mistake, so the record is about the recitation itself rather than a tick and a comment.

On an annual agreement, the + Add payment button was taking you to the student's profile instead of opening the payment form. You then had to navigate back and start the payment again. Irritating once, genuinely wearing on a busy collection evening.

Level progress now shows as a small bar on the admin student list and on the teacher's class roster. You can see who is close to finishing and who has stalled by reading down the list, instead of opening each student in turn.

Fee letters were redesigned around a standard DL window envelope. The recipient's address now sits where the window is, so a printed run can be folded and posted without anyone re-addressing envelopes by hand.

Results used to sit inside a dropdown you had to open one student at a time. They're now colour-coded pills you can read straight down a list, grouped by category, on both the admin side and the parent portal.