Reportage Properties is a UAE developer with a growing book of projects and master-planned communities. Their material — renders, brochures, fact sheets, floor plans, virtual tours, location links, construction photos — was scattered across a website, a Dropbox, and whatever a sales agent had saved on their phone. A buyer following a project had no single place to watch it take shape.
The ask: a native app for iOS and Android, fully bilingual in Arabic and English, with an admin web behind it so the marketing team could add a project, post an offer, or push an update without a developer.
Structure the whole app around the two things Reportage actually sells: projects and the communities they sit in. Everything else — search, offers, the media center, construction updates, announcements — is a different way into the same catalogue.
The app opens by asking for a language, so Arabic isn't a settings-screen afterthought — the entire layout mirrors. A skippable offer takes the first screen, then a home of live renders, a search that speaks the buyer's language (community, unit type, bedrooms, budget), and a chat button one tap away on every screen.
Not a keyword box — a set of choices: which community, apartment or villa, how many bedrooms, roughly what budget. Results come back as the same project cards used everywhere else in the app, so the catalogue always looks like one thing.
A render slider up top, an "Enquire now" button pinned above it, then everything on tabs: the overview, unit types, and construction updates. Amenities, a location map, and downloads for the brochure, fact sheet and floor plans sit inline — no jumping out to a website.
Filter by bedrooms and type to pull up the exact floor plan, open the gallery full-screen, or launch the 360° virtual tour from the same card. The VR badge is always in the corner so a buyer knows a walkthrough exists before they ask.
Each project keeps a timeline of site photos by date, with an empty state that promises the first one is coming. When the team posts an update — or a new render, or an offer — it goes out as a push, so following a project is a reason to keep the app installed.
Reportage shipped to the App Store and Google Play as a native bilingual app, backed by an admin web where the marketing team manages projects, communities, offers, the media center and announcements, and fires push notifications.
Every layout was designed twice — once left-to-right, once mirrored — so Arabic is a first-class reading experience, not a flipped afterthought. The design system was handed over with both directions specified.
Pick the app's backbone from the business, not the screens. Building everything off "projects" and "communities" meant search, offers and updates all reused one card and one detail page instead of each becoming its own mini-app.
Ask for language before anything else. Making it the first screen forced every layout to be designed in both directions from the start — far cheaper than retrofitting RTL after the LTR screens were signed off.
Give "following a project" a payoff. Dated construction updates plus push turned a brochure app into something a buyer opens again next month.