How We Built ORA: A Curated Lifestyle Marketplace App for UAE

Most marketplace apps fail at the same point: they try to be everything for everyone on day one. ORA took the opposite approach. It is a curated lifestyle marketplace for the UAE, built around a simple promise: discover the best spas, dining, fitness, beauty and things to do, buy a voucher in seconds, and redeem it with a single scan. We built the app and the website at Arominx, and ORA is now live on the App Store, on Google Play, and at or-a.ae, with more cities across the UAE coming soon. Here is what the product does, and the decisions behind it that we think are worth sharing.

The problem ORA solves

Booking a local experience is a surprisingly fragmented process. A spa treatment sits on one website, a brunch deal on another, a fitness class on a third, and half of them still want you to call or send a message to confirm. On the business side, most venues have no easy way to reach new customers without paying upfront for advertising or committing to a subscription.

ORA puts both sides in one place. Customers get a single app covering wellness, beauty, fitness, dining, events, clinics, kids and family activities, getaways and more. Venues get a way to list offers and get paid without a setup fee.

How it works for customers

The flow has three steps, and everything in the design is aimed at keeping each one short.

Browse and discover. You filter by category or location. ORA's approach is that every venue is handpicked, so the catalog stays curated instead of turning into an endless list.

Buy a voucher. Checkout works with Apple Pay or card, and the voucher lands in the app straight away. It stays valid for 90 days from purchase, so you can use it when it suits you rather than racing a deadline.

Show up and redeem. At the venue, you show a QR code and it gets scanned. There are no paper vouchers and no phone calls ahead.

How it works for venues

A marketplace only works if the supply side is easy, so the partner side was designed to be just as simple as the customer side.

Venues pay no setup fee and no monthly subscription. ORA takes a small commission only when a sale happens. A partner can list a first offer in under ten minutes, and the ORA team reviews and publishes it within 24 hours. Redemption is a QR scan that works on any phone, and the merchant does not need to install anything. Partners also get a dashboard showing sales, redemptions and revenue, and payouts go directly to their bank account.

The website matters as much as the app

A marketplace app does not live on its own. The ORA website at or-a.ae does several jobs at once: it explains the three-step flow to new customers, gives venues a clear path to apply as partners, links straight to both app stores, and hosts a journal with guides to the best fitness, wellness and things to do in Dubai. That content gives the brand a presence in search results, not just in the app stores, and it gives people a reason to visit before they ever download anything.

Three design decisions we would repeat

1. Make redemption frictionless on both ends. The QR voucher gives the customer instant confirmation and gives the venue a clean, verifiable record. Because the merchant side needs no special app, onboarding a new venue does not turn into a technical project. This matters more than it sounds: the easier it is for a small business to say yes, the faster your supply grows.

2. Curate first, scale second. It would have been easier to open the platform to anyone. Keeping the catalog handpicked is slower, but it protects what makes the app worth opening, which is that nothing in it feels random.

3. Design for multiple cities from the start. ORA launched in Dubai, then added Abu Dhabi, and Bali is now live too, with a city selector built into the app. More cities across the UAE are coming soon. Treating location as a core part of the product, not an afterthought, is what makes adding a city a content and partnership task instead of a rebuild.

Shipping in the open

ORA's first version went live in June 2026, and it has had thirteen releases since, including the Abu Dhabi expansion in September and a redesigned user experience in October. That pace is deliberate. For a marketplace, the real feedback comes from live customers and live merchants, so the fastest way to improve is to launch a focused first version and keep refining it in public. With more UAE cities on the way, the same approach continues: launch focused, learn from real usage, then expand.

What this means if you are planning a marketplace

If you are thinking about building a marketplace app, a few questions are worth answering before any development starts. Who are your two sides, and what is the easiest possible first transaction for each of them? What is your commercial model, and does it remove friction for the side you need to attract first? Will you launch in one location or several, and does the product's structure support that? Getting those answers clear early is what keeps a marketplace build focused.

Try ORA

You can download the app on the App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-ora-app/id6777068652) or Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arominx.oradubai), or explore it at https://or-a.ae/. ORA is live in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bali today, with more UAE cities coming soon. If you run a venue and want to reach new customers, you can apply to partner with ORA through the website.

If you are planning a marketplace, booking platform or voucher-based app of your own, this is the kind of product we build at Arominx. We are happy to talk through your idea and tell you honestly what the smallest useful first version looks like.