Dubai: Share pictures with your friends and family, create private or public albums, discuss issues based on shared photos. Yebab — the latest photo-sharing app on Apple’s app store — could be the UAE’s answer to Instagram.
Developed by Emirati siblings Murshed and Mareyah Mohammad, the app was launched this week to a grand welcome by social media users.
“We had more than 1,000 users in less than six hours after launching the app and we are overwhelmed by the response,” said Murshed Mohammad, founder of Yebab, who also operates an online wedding directory of the same name.
Buoyed by an early strong interest, Mohammad said there is much more to the app than just photo sharing.
“There might be dozens of photo-sharing apps on the market, but Yebab is different in more than one way. The app combines photo sharing with conversation as well as shopping. It allows users to create personal or shared albums with various levels of privacy settings.”
Pictures from the wedding directory www.yebab.com also appear on the app.
“We are combining some of the features from our wedding directory with the app. Any business venture can join and upload the pics of their merchandise and people can find pictures based on different themes and contact the merchants to make a purchase,” said Mohammad.
Although shopping for merchandise on display cannot be done as yet through the app, Mohammad is planning to add the e-commerce feature to it soon.
Yebab is already one of the most popular photo-based apps in UAE, ranking number four in the category on Apple’s App Store, while it stands at 15 in the list of most popular UAE apps.
The siblings began working on the application early last year, and it took them a year to complete the task and launch the app.
Combine features
“There are popular apps like WhatsApp and Instagram through which one can share pictures but we have tried to combine the features of these two apps on a single platform. Though you cannot use the application just to chat you can start a conversation around a picture. We have also tried to take the middle path when it comes to privacy settings, it’s not just either private or public. There are different levels, like you can keep an album private or share certain pictures with only certain people, while certain pictures you can keep for business purposes alone,” said Mareyah, co-founder of Yebab.
People can also browse for pics from various topics such as fashion, henna, make-up, travel, health and fitness.
Photo-sharing apps are among the top used apps in the world, with WhatsApp users sharing more than 600 million pictures daily, while Facebook and Snapchat users share 350 millions a day, along with Instagram that sees 55 million pictures shared every day.
Yebab.com was launched in 2008 by Murshed and Mareyah as an online wedding directory to help future brides and grooms in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Currently, it is the biggest online wedding directory in the region.
Starting up at a cost of Dh2,700 six years ago, Yebab’s business is now worth millions.
The app is available on the App Store for IOS devices and can be downloaded using the link, itunes.com/apps/yebab.
