Qatar at a glance
These are the facts that most often shape a product brief. Check anything regulatory with qualified local counsel before you rely on it.
| Topic | What to know |
|---|---|
| Languages | Arabic is the official language. English is widely used in business, and many residents read other languages first. |
| Time zone | UTC+3 all year. Qatar does not change its clocks, so the gap to a country that does will shift twice a year. |
| Working week | Sunday to Thursday for most organisations. Friday and Saturday are the weekend. |
| Currency | The Qatari riyal (QAR), pegged to the US dollar. |
| Telephone code | +974. Many residents also hold numbers from other countries. |
| Personal data law | Law No. 13 of 2016 on Personal Data Privacy Protection. The Qatar Financial Centre has its own data protection rules. |
| Cybersecurity | A national cybersecurity agency and national information assurance standards. Banks and other regulated sectors add their own rules. |
| Payments | International cards, local debit cards, mobile wallets and bank transfers. Cash on delivery still appears in some retail. |
| Public holidays | Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, set by the Islamic calendar and confirmed close to the date, and National Day on 18 December. |
This page is awareness, not legal advice. Laws, regulators and standards change, and which of them apply to you depends on your sector and how your company is registered. Confirm everything with qualified local counsel.
Building for Arabic, English and more languages
Qatar is a multilingual market. Arabic is the official language and English is the working language of many companies, but a large part of the resident community comes from other countries and reads other languages first. A delivery app, a health portal or a government service may need Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tagalog, Bengali or Nepali alongside Arabic and English. Look at your own users before you decide, and do not assume.
Whatever you launch with, build for more than two languages. Keep every string in resource files, put no text inside images, mirror layouts with start and end rather than left and right, and format dates, numbers and currency by locale. Then a third language costs translation, not re-engineering. Our Arabic and RTL design work and the bilingual products guide cover the method, and the glossary explains localization and right-to-left design.
Details that break Arabic products
- Tone. Use clear Modern Standard Arabic for interfaces and ask a Qatari reader to review marketing copy. Over-literal translation reads as foreign.
- Names and search. One name has many spellings, such as Mohammed, Muhammad and Mohamed, and Arabic letters have variants such as alef with and without hamza. Normalise text for search, duplicate checks and identity matching, and keep what the person typed.
- Digits and dates. Choose 0 to 9 or Arabic-Indic digits per product and do not mix them on one screen. Show Gregorian dates by default and add Hijri dates only where users need them.
- Phones and addresses. Accept international numbers and validate with a maintained library such as libphonenumber, not a home-made pattern. Many addresses in Qatar use a zone, street and building number, so allow a map pin or a landmark.
- Mixed direction. An English product name or a number inside an Arabic sentence can scramble punctuation. Test those strings on real screens.
Data protection: what to ask counsel
Qatar has a dedicated personal data law, Law No. 13 of 2016 on Personal Data Privacy Protection. In general terms it concerns how organisations collect, use, keep and share information about people, and it gives people certain rights over their data. The Qatar Financial Centre, which has its own legal framework, has its own data protection rules, so the regime that applies can depend on how a business is registered.
Counsel decides what the law requires of you. We build the technical side: collecting less, protecting what you keep, and being able to find, correct and delete a person's data. Bring these questions to your adviser.
- Consent and purpose. Which uses of data need the person's consent, and what must the notice say? Does the answer change for marketing, children's data or health data?
- Retention. How long may each kind of record be kept, and what happens at the end: deletion, anonymisation or archive?
- People's rights. What must you do when someone asks to see, correct or delete their data?
- Cross-border transfers. May personal data go to a cloud region, a support tool or an analytics service outside Qatar, and on what conditions?
- Hosting location. Do your sector, your contracts or your clients' policies require data to stay in the country?
- Incidents. Who must be told if personal data is exposed, and in what form?
The answers shape the build. Early in a project we list the personal data your product touches, and that list becomes the basis for hosting choices, retention jobs and the threat model. Our security practices page describes how we build the products we deliver.
What Qatari buyers expect on cybersecurity
Qatar has a national cybersecurity agency and national information assurance standards, and regulated sectors such as banking add their own requirements. In practice, large organisations, government bodies and regulated firms ask suppliers to show how a product is secured, often with a questionnaire and evidence. Which standards apply depends on your sector and your client, so ask them for the list in writing.
Suppliers are commonly asked about:
- how access is controlled: roles, least privilege and multi-factor authentication for staff and admins
- how data is protected in transit and at rest, and where it is hosted
- how code is reviewed and tested before each release
- penetration testing reports, and how the findings were fixed
- logging, monitoring and an incident plan
- how third-party libraries and services are tracked and updated
Our method answers those questions: a threat review at the start, secure code review and penetration testing before launch, and a prioritised fix list. We give you evidence for your own compliance work. We do not offer certification, and we cannot promise that a product will pass a particular assessment. The page on cybersecurity for Qatar businesses goes deeper.
Payments and sign-in
Payment options in Qatar commonly include international cards, local debit cards, mobile wallets and bank transfers. Which of them you can offer depends on your payment gateway and acquiring bank, and on where your company is registered, so ask early. Whatever the mix, the engineering rules stay the same: let the gateway hold card data, use 3-D Secure, store amounts as whole minor units of the riyal, make payment requests idempotent, and confirm payments on the server instead of trusting the app or the browser. Our pages on e-commerce web development and fintech show where these choices appear.
Qatar has a national digital identity that residents use for government e-services, and some other services accept it where the service owner offers it. If your product needs it, the agreement and approval process with the identity owner is often the slow part, not the code. Start that conversation before the design is final, and plan a fallback such as phone or email verification with multi-factor authentication.
Working week, calendar and launch timing
Most organisations work Sunday to Thursday. That changes release planning: ship early in the working week, when your team and your client are both at their desks, and avoid Thursday afternoon, when nobody is left to watch a release. Some dates also move the calendar.
| Period | What changes | How we plan |
|---|---|---|
| Ramadan | Working hours are usually shorter and start later, and consumers are most active in the evening. | Book demos and approvals inside the shorter day. Plan consumer launches and notifications for the evening. |
| Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha | Public holidays of several days. Dates follow the Islamic calendar and are confirmed close to the day. | Freeze changes before the break, close approvals early and name someone on call. |
| National Day, 18 December | A public holiday. | Avoid release and campaign deadlines on that day. |
| Summer | Many decision makers travel. | Name a backup approver for every sign-off. |
Retail and consumer products often see traffic peaks around Ramadan, Eid and year-end shopping, so load-test before them rather than after. The guide to launching software in the Gulf has a longer checklist.
How we work with Qatar teams
We work remotely with clients and plan calls around your working day, Sunday to Thursday. Weekly demos and plain-language plans mean you see progress without needing to be in the same room, and decisions are written down so a colleague who missed the call can follow. If an on-site meeting would help, ask us what is practical.
A project starts with a short call or a written brief. We reply with questions and a proposed plan, usually within one business day, then scope and estimate across design, build, security and timeline. You review the roadmap and agree priorities, and we build. How we work and pricing models describe the engagement shapes, from a two-week discovery sprint to a dedicated team.
Sectors and what we build
These are the kinds of products teams in each sector ask for, and the question that usually comes first. They are examples of scope, not a record of past work.
- [Fintech](/industries/fintech): wallets, onboarding and payment flows. First question: which financial regulator applies, the central bank or the authorities of the Qatar Financial Centre.
- [Government](/industries/government): citizen services that are Arabic first, accessible and tied to national identity. First question: which security and procurement requirements the buyer sets.
- [Healthcare](/industries/healthcare): patient portals and booking. First question: how health data is classified and where it may be hosted.
- [E-commerce](/industries/ecommerce): Arabic storefronts, local payment methods and delivery. First question: which gateway, and which address format.
- [Logistics](/industries/logistics): tracking and driver apps, often in several languages and with weak signal. First question: what must work offline.
- [Education](/industries/education): learning platforms in Arabic and English. First question: how children's data is handled.
Our services for Qatar
Two pages go deeper for Qatar: cybersecurity for Qatar businesses and mobile development for Qatar businesses. The rest of our work follows the same pattern of bilingual by default and security built in: UI/UX design, web development, no-code, CMS solutions with a multilingual CMS, and cybersecurity.