WhatsApp calling does not work in the United Arab Emirates. Messages are fine, photos are fine, voice notes go through without any trouble at all, but the moment you try to actually ring somebody the call sits there for a few seconds and then dies. FaceTime the same, consumer Skype the same, Viber and Messenger the same, and the reason is that the two carriers here, e& and du, run deep packet inspection on the network and drop the traffic that belongs to a voice or video call before it goes anywhere.
That single restriction shapes what is on the phone of nearly every one of the roughly nine million people living in this country, and it is the sort of thing you only find out about once you have already landed.
Botim Exists Because WhatsApp Calls Do Not Work Here
Most residents here are expats with family somewhere else, Kerala or Manila or Lahore or Cairo, and the free calling app that the rest of the world runs on simply does not function, so what happens instead is that people end up on Botim.
Botim comes from Astra Tech, which started life inside Etisalat’s digital arm, and it holds a licence from the TDRA, which is the telecom regulator here, so it works where the unlicensed ones do not. There are a handful of others in the same position, C’Me and HiU Messenger and Voico among them, but Botim is the one that took the market. You activate an Internet Calling Plan through your carrier to make it work, and on Etisalat that means texting ICP to 1012, which is genuinely the entire setup process. Around AED 50 a month after that.
The interesting bit is that almost nobody sat down and compared Botim against anything, because there was nothing legal to compare it against. You land at DXB, you work out over the first day or two that your calls will not connect, somebody at the office or in the building tells you what everyone uses, and it goes onto the phone that evening.
UAE PASS Is The One You Cannot Function Without
Over five million downloads and the top Emirati built app on Google Play, made by the Digital Dubai Authority rather than by any private company.
It is basically the login for the whole country. Renewing a visa, paying a fine, signing a tenancy contract, opening a bank account, filing anything with any ministry at all, checking where your Emirates ID has got to, it all runs through UAE PASS and you authenticate once for the lot of it.
Not much else to say about it really. Government software mostly is not pleasant to use and this one is fine.
Talabat Took Forty Five Percent Of Food Delivery And Then Went After Your Groceries
Talabat holds roughly 45 percent of UAE food delivery with more than fifteen thousand restaurants on it. Deliveroo sits somewhere around twenty five. Careem Food, Noon Food and Keeta, the Meituan backed one that launched in Dubai in September 2025 and has been handing out free delivery to buy its way in, are splitting whatever is left.
Their gross merchandise value hit 7.4 billion dollars in 2024, and then in February 2025 they bought InstaShop for 32 million dollars. InstaShop was the aggregator that connected people to Spinneys and Carrefour and Waitrose, and Talabat folded the whole thing into the rider fleet and the dark store network they already had running. Groceries are now about a third of what Talabat sells.
Most people never made a decision about that. You downloaded it for shawarma at midnight, then at some point the grocery tab appeared and you started tapping it, and now a decent share of the country buys its milk and washing powder through a food delivery app.
Careem Earns Its Spot Because Nothing Else Covers The Whole Day
Careem is the one I would argue hardest for if somebody wanted to cut this list down to four.
It started as ride hailing, the regional answer to Uber, and Uber ended up buying it, but it kept expanding sideways until it stopped really being a taxi app. Rides, food, groceries, courier runs, bike rental, bill payments, all in the one place. Careem Plus runs AED 19 a month, cheapest subscription of anything comparable here.
A working day in Dubai is not one problem, it is six small ones stacked on top of each other. Getting to the office, getting lunch, getting something across town before five, getting home, sorting dinner, getting the week’s shopping in. Careem is the only thing on this list that touches all six, and without it you are running four separate apps to cover the same ground.
The Entertainment App Is Not The One You Are Thinking Of
Do You Think It Is 1xbet, Because Dubai Is A Lavish Life Hub?
That is the guess most people outside the region make, and it is not an unreasonable one given how heavily the betting and casino style platforms market across the Gulf. 1xbet does pull real download numbers here.
The actual answer is Shahid.
Which is MBC Group’s Arabic streaming platform, carrying 4.4 million subscribers across the Middle East and North Africa as of December 2024 according to Omdia, whose figures were presented in Dubai at CABSAT. YouTube Premium is second on 3.7 million. Netflix is third on 3.0 million. StarzPlay sits fourth on 2.3 million.
So in a streaming market carrying twenty seven million subscriptions and worth somewhere around 1.5 billion dollars, the American platform that most people assume dominates everywhere is behind an Arabic broadcaster and behind YouTube.
Some of that is about the screen. Over 70 percent of streaming in this region happens on a phone, against roughly half globally, and Shahid was built mobile first from the beginning while Netflix was still designing around a television in a living room and has been catching up ever since.
The bigger part is Ramadan. Subscriptions across the region jump 40 to 60 percent during that month because the MBC drama slate is a genuine cultural event and families organise their evenings around what is airing. Netflix has started timing its Arabic originals to land inside the same window, which tells you they understand the problem perfectly well, they just cannot manufacture thirty years of habit.
There is one more thing about that season worth knowing if you are new here, which is that everything slows down, not just streaming. Deliveries take longer after sunset because every rider in the city is busy at the same moment.
Whether Any Of This Changes
The VoIP restriction is the one people ask about most, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Gulf News reported years ago that the authorities were in talks about lifting the WhatsApp call ban, and it never happened. The TDRA has not put out a timeline. What seems more likely in the near term is wider paid licensed access rather than the whole thing being opened up for free, though that is a guess and I would not plan around it.
If you are moving here, install Botim before you fly. Sort UAE PASS out in your first week, because you will need it before you expect to.
