Apps for Sabbath and Sunset Times, Compared

01Most Sabbath times apps print a custom, not a sunset

Open Hebcal's Shabbat page and it hands you two times. Candle lighting, defaulting to 18 minutes before sundown. Havdalah, defaulting to the moment the sun sits 8.5 degrees below the horizon. Neither is sunset. Both are deliberate margins, front and back, so the day is entered generously rather than tightly — and the tradition keeping them has weighed them a very long time.

They are also not everyone's reckoning. A Messianic household, an Adventist family, a Hebrew-roots fellowship — plenty of readers keep sundown to sundown flat, no margin, and find the best-built tools in the category quietly handing them somebody else's minute. That is not the apps misbehaving. It is a category built for one audience and browsed by two.

Some tools make the margin a setting, but you have to know to look — a promise of accurate Shabbat times does not by itself identify which number you need. So the useful question is not which app is best. It is which app will show you the sun. (What those degrees and minutes measure is unpacked in what time the Sabbath starts.)

02Four things worth scoring

Feature lists in this category all sound identical. These four separate them.

What the number is. Sunset, or sunset minus an offset you can edit, or an offset you cannot. Ask this first and half the shortlist disappears.

How much of the calculation it will show you. Tools can use different assumptions about elevation, atmospheric conditions, and customary margins. Hebcal's form puts both margins in front of you as editable fields and offers to fold elevation into the estimate. Check what each phone app exposes rather than assuming its displayed number uses the same settings. If an offset or elevation option is absent, consult the documentation before treating the result as plain local sunset.

Whether it will interrupt you. A time you have to go and look up is a time you forget at 4pm on a Friday, shopping still in the boot.

Where it lives. A widget or a watch complication puts the number in front of you with no app launch, which is most of the game.

03Built for candle-lighting, and the one that will switch it off

Hebcal is the most useful free thing in the category, and it is a website rather than an app, so there is no platform question: both defaults editable, an optional elevation adjustment, a weekly email before Shabbat, feeds and a printable year. It is the tool most likely to survive a phone change.

Among the phone apps built on the custom, Shabbat & Jewish Holiday Times by Eran Levy is worth considering if the alert matters most — you choose how many minutes ahead it fires, and its listing names its source, Hebcal. Shabbat Alarm Clock & Times covers similar ground. Shabbat & Holiday Times from Chabad.org lists candle-lighting and ending times for your location or a city you enter, with reminders and links to Torah and holiday information. Hebrew Calendar from iEnd is a whole Jewish-life app that includes the times and an offline siddur, with an optional monthly membership for full access and ad removal. At the detailed end sits MyZmanim: named halachic opinions, weather-aware calculation, and a countdown to the next zman.

And the one that solves the actual problem: Shabbat Times by Shalom Veffer toggles between candle lighting and sunset, and lets you edit both the offset and the end-of-Shabbat calculation. One switch, and the app stops assuming. The catch is a very recent iOS requirement, so check compatibility before trying to install it on an older phone.

04Apps that just give you Friday and Saturday sundown

The Sabbath App advertises Friday and Saturday sunset for your location, a reminder at both ends, and Scripture on the Sabbath beside it, for a one-time purchase. Its rating sits in the mid-threes across a modest number of reviews, so read recent feedback as well as the feature list. For a reader who wants sundown without a candle-lighting offset, it is a purpose-built option.

Shabbat/Sabbath Clock is free and frames the seventh day as Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, with room to reflect and plan for each one. Listed in late 2025 with almost no reviews behind it, so treat it as promising rather than proven. Next Sabbath counts down to the next Sabbath start on a watch complication and has shipped nothing since October 2020 — nearly six years, a long time for anything touching time zones and daylight saving.

Those are three options with different levels of visible activity and user feedback. A listing is not a hands-on reliability test, so check recent reports and compatibility before relying on an alert.

05When a plain sunset app is the better Sabbath app

Another option is a general astronomy app. It can provide sunset without a religious offset, though its location, elevation, and calculation settings still deserve a check.

Sunrise Sunset Widget is free with an optional subscription and still shipping updates through 2026. It offers home-screen and lock-screen widgets, notifications at sunrise and sunset, and location selection worldwide; its listing also includes Apple Watch support. Sunset Predictions: Alpenglow offers Apple Watch support with complications, Live Activities, StandBy widgets, reminder alarms, and a Pro tier that can schedule alarms automatically. Sunsets Reminder can notify you between one and sixty minutes before sundown, making it usable as a Friday sundown reminder with no theology attached; it also includes sunrise reminders and a photo journal.

06Which day is a calendar's job. Which minute is not.

So here is where Day 4 — A Witness of Time goes: second in a two-app setup, never first. Every app named above answers when tonight. Day 4 answers which day, and that is the whole of its remit — the missing sunset clock is a boundary it drew, not a gap it failed to close.

What it counts instead is a 364-day year: 52 whole weeks, four seasons of 91 days apiece, nothing left over anywhere. Each spring that year is re-pinned to the March equinox, and the equinox is looked up in a canonical per-year table rather than averaged or worked out on the fly, since it refuses to keep to one Gregorian date. Day 1 falls on the week's day 4. The Sabbaths fall on year-days 4, 11, 18, through to 361; the first is the fourth counted day of the year, not the fourth weekday. Those year-days are fixed for good. Which square of your wall calendar each one occupies is not, and turning the first into the second is the work the app does. Counting then halts at 364 for one or two days carrying no number — the Waiting Space — until the equinox re-pins Day 1, and the sacred week is not running through them.

One caution no store listing will hand you. The 364-day scheme survives because Enoch's Astronomical Book, Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls kept copying it — that much is manuscript evidence, and it is firm. Whether the Temple itself ever ran on it is a question scholars have not closed, and Day 4 does not pretend to have closed it. The app keeps the reckoning. It does not hand you a verdict on the argument.

Your sacred date, the day's devotional and the next Sabbath cost nothing and need no account, on iPhone, iPad, Android and web, with home-screen widgets and Apple Watch. Pair it with whichever sunset source you picked above. An introduction to Day 4 walks through the rest, and the wider comparison sits in the biblical calendar app roundup.

07Common questions