Software and app development in Abu Dhabi

In 2016, I shipped PokeSpot, a mobile companion app for Pokémon Go, at the height of the craze. It reached the Top 5 of the App Store and passed 1 million downloads. Ten years later I still design the system and write the code myself, now from Dubai, for companies across the UAE, Abu Dhabi included.

12 years of shipping software: a Top 5 App Store app, a document AI SaaS built and sold, analytics on 400M+ events a month, and a news platform with 500,000+ articles moved without downtime.

What I have built

• Mobile apps. PokeSpot, on iOS and Android, with its release pipelines and store rollouts. At Matters, the core features of a mobility app (carsharing, rentals, minicabs) and its iOS releases.
• SaaS products. privately.ai, a document AI product: teams ask their own files a question and get the answer with its source, scanned PDFs included. I built it as CTO; the IP and the code were sold in 2025.
• Data platforms. At relevanC, analytics on 400M+ events a month, and a campaign tool where campaign managers need half the clicks they used to.
• A process automated end to end. At Foundingbird, company incorporation went from weeks to hours: Malaysia’s first fully online company-secretary service.
• Real-time systems. At Flashbreak, the broadcast engine of a live game show, with thousands of concurrent viewers across two shows a day.
• Rebuilds without downtime. A national news outlet’s platform, 500,000+ articles moved to a stack the company owns with zero downtime for readers (the case study).

One engineer or an agency

Most companies that come up for “software company Abu Dhabi” are agencies: a sales team, a project manager and a bench of developers. I work differently. I design the system and write the code, and I bring in specialists for mobile, design or data when the project needs them. You talk to the person who builds.

The limit is bandwidth. A project that needs twenty developers from the first week is a job for an agency, and I will tell you so in my first reply.

Building for Abu Dhabi

• Arabic and English from the first screen. An app for Abu Dhabi usually needs both languages, and Arabic means right-to-left layouts. Plan them in the first design; adding them to finished screens means redoing the layouts. Arabic text also breaks where people do not expect it: copy it out of a PDF and some words come back with their letters swapped (Arabic PDF to text).
• The data rules depend on where you are registered. A company in Abu Dhabi Global Market follows ADGM’s own data protection regulations (ADGM guide). Most other companies in Abu Dhabi follow the federal PDPL (UAE PDPL guide). Know which one applies before you decide where the app keeps personal data.
• AI inside the product. If the app has to answer questions from your own documents, I have built that at scale (company brain).

How a project runs

1. In writing first. What the app does, for whom, what “done” means, and the fixed price of the first phase.
2. A first version in front of real users early, then phases that each ship something people use.
3. You own everything from day one: the code, the cloud accounts and the data.