The guardian and wali role
For many families, the search for a spouse is not something a person does alone. Amana treats that as a normal way to use the app rather than an exception to work around — but it also holds the guardian accountable for the profile they create.
Two-stage signup: two accounts, created in order
A guardian does not link to a profile that already exists. They build it. That is a deliberate design choice: it means there is never any ambiguity about who created a profile or who is operating it.
-
The guardian creates their own account
An ordinary Amana account, in the guardian's own real name, with their own email address. Nothing about it is special — it is the same signup any member goes through.
-
The guardian creates the profile
Then, in a second stage, the guardian builds the profile for the person seeking marriage: their name, date of birth, gender, sect, prayer level, profession and the relationship between them.
Both people must be 18 or over. Amana checks this on our servers for the guardian and for the person the profile is for — it is not just a rule in the app that could be worked around.
How the guardian operates the profile
The guardian signs in to their own account and switches into the profile they manage. While they are switched in, a banner sits across the top of every screen naming whose profile they are currently operating, with a one-tap way back to their own account. There is no way to be in someone else's profile without that banner being visible.
Everything the profile can do, the guardian does: completing it, adding photos, expressing interest, searching, messaging, calling, and submitting verification checks.
A guardian can manage more than one profile — several children, or siblings — and switches between them the same way.
What the guardian can see
Say this part plainly: the guardian sees everything.
Because the guardian operates the profile through their own login, they can read every conversation on it, in full, at any time. There is no private area of a guardian-created profile.
There is a "chat observation" setting in the guardian's controls, but you should understand what it does and does not do: it records the family's stated intention. It does not create a private space, because the guardian already holds the profile's session. If you want a genuinely private conversation, you need your own account rather than a guardian-created profile.
We would rather be blunt about this than let anyone assume a privacy boundary that does not exist. It is why the very first screen in the app asks whether you are creating a profile for yourself or for someone else — that choice has real consequences and should be made knowingly.
The accountability requirement
A guardian-created profile is not discoverable by anyone — it does not appear in anyone's Discover batch and does not turn up in search — until the guardian's own government ID check has been verified.
The reasoning is simple. Someone is presenting a person to the platform who is not present to speak for themselves. Before that profile reaches strangers, we want to know exactly who is doing the presenting. Not the person on the profile — the guardian.
Until that check clears, the guardian can build the profile and complete it fully. It just will not be shown to anyone.
Everyone can see it is a guardian profile
Profiles created by a guardian are labelled as such wherever they appear — in Discover, in search results, on shortlists and in conversation lists. Anyone deciding whether to express interest knows before they decide that they may be corresponding with a family member rather than the person directly.
This label cannot be turned off. It is not a setting.
Linking and unlinking
A guardian can unlink themselves from a profile at any time, from their own profile screen, behind a confirmation step. Unlinking:
- stops the guardian being able to switch into that profile;
- removes that profile from Discover and search, since the accountability the visibility rested on is gone.
Unlinking is not something you can undo yourself. It is recorded rather than erased, so that an unlink made in error can be reversed — but only by contacting Amana. We chose to make it recoverable by us rather than instantly reversible in the app, because a link between two people is exactly the sort of thing that should not be flipped back and forth without a record.
Membership is per profile
A guardian paying for their own account does not pay for the profiles they manage. Each profile is a separate membership. If a guardian is managing a profile that has not been subscribed, they will be asked to subscribe while switched into that profile, exactly as anyone else would be.
The same is true of the free-access route for verified sisters: it applies to the profile that holds the verified ID check, not to whoever set it up.
Deleting an account
If a guardian deletes their own Amana account, the profiles they still manage are deleted with it. A guardian-created profile has no separate login of its own, so leaving one behind would strand personal data that nobody could reach or remove.
A guardian-created profile can also be deleted on its own, without the guardian's account being affected.
What Amana does not do
We would rather list the limits than let them be discovered later:
- There is no approval step before a new conversation starts. A guardian sees conversations as they happen; they do not sign off on them in advance.
- Amana does not verify the relationship between a guardian and the person whose profile they create. The relationship is stated by the guardian and shown as stated.
- A guardian-created profile cannot sign in independently. If the person wants their own account, that is a separate account, created by them.
If you are the person a profile was created for
You have the same rights over that profile's data as any Amana member: it can be exported, and it can be deleted. If a profile has been created for you and you are not comfortable with it, contact us and we will help. How to reach Amana.