What Most Startups To Overlook on the Custom Mobile App Development in Saudi Arabia.

Last updated on November 18th, 2025 at 12:39 pm

In the past couple of months, I had conversations with founders of startups in Riyadh and Jeddah, and the common denominator is that they created an app, got downloads, but no one is using it. Sound familiar?

The Saudi application market is active we are talking USD 1.99 billion in 2024 with USD 5.70 billion expected in 2033. That’s serious money. The point here is however that most startups are self-shooting even before starting.

Table of Contents

They believe that downloads are equal to success.

A founder met me last month to celebrate 10,000 downloads. Two weeks later? Less than 200 active users.

It is no use downloading a good app that does not bring immediate value. Saudi users, in particular, that 70% and below group prefer apps to run immediately they are built. Bilingual assistance is not the luxury, it is the life. When your Arabic user interface seems like it was an appendix, customers jump ship. Fast.

The mistake? Construction on launch day rather than day 30. Your actual metrics is retention. At 30 days, e-commerce apps are to achieve 25-40% retention. Unless you are keeping track of that, you are flying blind.

They Underestimate Costs of compliance.

This is where the cost comes in. The fintech app you are going to build? Licensing – just with SAMA requires budgeting 1-3 million. Not development absolutely right, sir, just the paperwork.

I have witnessed startups that ran out of seed capital attempting to find their way around the Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL), industry-specific policies and app store demands in various governmental bodies. Regulations are not bad, it is the fact that founders regard their compliance as a second-day task, rather than a priority.

Healthcare apps? You are dealing with Ministry of Health approvals, Saudi Food and Drug Authority sign-offs and local municipality requirements. Each one’s a separate process. They all consume time you probably did not plan to allocate budget on.

They Replicate Good Practices in other places.

It does not work in the case of Instagram but with Saudi Arabia. Nor does Uber but with [insert random service].

It is not only a location-specific market because Saudi market has a very culture-specific geography. The Apps should have features such as Islamic banking, Ramadan specific mode, and ability to make payments via Mada and STC Pay. These are not nice-to-haves to improve conversion, but table stakes.

I observed a food delivery company spending months struggling as they had not adopted the payment mechanism that Saudi users are convinced of. In the meantime, new competitors who embedded local payment gateways at the beginning gained market share that they lost.

They Cheap on Design, and They Wonder Why Customers Quit.

Four weeks to create an appropriate UI/UX design is not excessive it is the price you pay to make sure that whatever you come out with does not look like it was stapled together over a weekend.

Apps such as Tawakkalna, Absher, and foreign applications as Netflix have trained Saudi users. Competing with those experiences are your app. When your navigation is confusing, load time is slow or the interface is not premium, you have lost users.

Design ROI is not items like cotton wool. Applications that have easy to use UX are 2 to 3 times more likely to be converted than applications with a poor UX. That is money that you are leaving on the table.

They Construct Everything all at Once.

Members of this team have seen it ( Founder ). Vision becomes feature list. Rather than producing a 18 week, SAR 500,000 feature list as expected, feature list design has become a bloat application taking 24 weeks and SAR 500,000 to get done. Launch happens. Market has moved on.

Build an MVP. Test your core assumption. To create a fitness app, you do not put a 50-workout program in your MVP, you code one good program that benefits people and shows them that you are not wasting their time.

I realize that it is difficult to trim things you are eager about. Do it anyway. Your roadmap is not of interest to the market. It is concerned that your app is a solution to a real problem today.

They Also Forget Apps To Feed.

Your app launches. Congrats. Now what?

The vast majority of startups do not take into consideration that apps require 20-30 percent of the initial development expenses every year to remain a current and relevant site. Bugs fixes, security patches, OS patches, new features–all that is not optional.

The problem is that apps which become stagnant lose traffic to rivals which continue to develop. You are not creating a site to launch and forget about it. You are creating a house that requires maintenance.

The Bottom Line

The Saudi Arabia opportunity exists. Billion are being injected into digital infrastructure through Vision 2030. The penetration rate of smartphones is more than 97 percent. The ecosystem of startups increased by 200 per cent in the recent past.

Opportunity is not east money.

In case you are developing a custom mobile app with your startup in Saudi Arabia, this is what really counts: An initial narrow MVP that is one problem that you do extremely well. Budget compliance day one it is not going to go away. Design specifically to Saudi users rather than and not to general users. Retention of tracks meant not downloads. Not only on the launch day, plan to continue developing.

Winners in this market are not the ones that have the largest budgets and most impressive features. They are the ones who realize that custom mobile app development to open startups in Saudi Arabia is not about creating an app, but something that people actually want, in a manner that does not ignore the colossal potential of the market, but at the same time, striking at very specific needs.

Have those fundamentals under your belt and you are already a step further than most of your competition.