New ‘Howlak’ app helps Qatar residents on the move decide where to eat

With so many restaurants opening in Qatar each year, residents sometimes find it hard to figure out which ones are worth trying, especially when they’re not at home in front of a computer.

Qatar residents Mohammed Al-Rumaihi and Nasser Al-Saadi said the “where do you want to eat?” debate happened so frequently while they were on the move, often in a vehicle, that they decided to launch an app to help them come up with an answer.

There are plenty of restaurant reviews sites in Qatar and elsewhere, but it’s often difficult to tell if the information is still current – especially on sites built for desktop platforms that can be difficult to read on the small screen of a mobile device and don’t effectively sort eateries by location.

Al-Rumaihi and Al-Saadi, both in their early 30s, said they saw an opportunity in the market to build a smartphone app that takes advantage of the device’s GPS to tell users about the best restaurants in their current vicinity.

Together with a third business partner, they soft-launched Howlak – which means “around you” in Arabic – for Apple devices in June.

The app is currently being downloaded “hundreds” of times a week and has some 1,500 restaurants in and around Doha in its database, ranging from juice stalls to hotel eateries, as well as another 7,000 places in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah.

Original article by Peter Kovessy

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New ‘Howlak’ app helps Qatar residents on the move decide where to eat