2025 Through the Lens of Data.. What Yango Group Reveals About Everyday Life in MENA

Dubai – January 21, 2026

UAE-based Yango Group announced new insights from across its services in the Middle East and North Africa, highlighting how people across the region used mobility, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and AI-powered technologies in their day-to-day lives throughout 2025. Drawing on aggregated data, the overview looks at everyday behaviours and usage patterns across multiple markets, reflecting a year in which millions of daily moments — from morning commutes and evening streaming to smart speaker queries — came together to reveal how digital services are increasingly woven into routines across MENA.

The insights below reflect aggregated and anonymised data from across Yango Group’s services, capturing how these technologies were used across the region throughout 2025:

Mobility

Yango Ride’s urban mobility data from 2025 shows that convenience and reliability continue to define how people move across MENA cities, rather than premium experiences.

Across markets including the UAE and Oman, journeys to and from international airports consistently ranked among the most common ride-hailing use cases. In Oman, destinations within the Muscat Governorate dominated customer demand, with frequent trips centred around Muscat International Airport as well as major commercial hubs such as Mall of Oman and Oman Avenues Mall, particularly in Al Seeb and Boshar Wilayats. The prominence of these locations highlights how ride-hailing is used not only for long-distance or travel-related journeys, but also as a practical solution for everyday retail and leisure mobility.

A similar pattern emerged in the UAE, where airport connectivity and large urban destinations shaped demand. Trips to Zayed International Airport and Dubai International Airports ranked among the most frequent, alongside high-traffic commercial and lifestyle destinations such as Yas Mall and Dubai Mall. The concentration of rides around these locations reinforces the role of ride-hailing as an extension of daily urban infrastructure, supporting shopping, social activities, and routine city movement rather than occasional, discretionary travel.

At the same time, customers across the MENA region overwhelmingly favoured economy car options over premium categories. Mid-size sedans, particularly models like the Toyota Camry, emerged as the most frequently used vehicles — reflecting a preference for practical comfort, predictable pricing, and availability rather than status or luxury. Arrival times further reinforced this shift toward everyday dependability. In Muscat, average pickup times remained around three minutes throughout the year, while Abu Dhabi consistently stayed under six minutes, underscoring how on-demand mobility has evolved from an occasional convenience into a reliable, routine urban service.

Smart Devices

In Q4 2025, Yango Yasmina recorded significant growth in adoption and engagement in the UAE, reflecting the accelerating role of AI in everyday life. Users engaged with Yango Yasmina an average of 22 interactions per user per day, with peak days reaching up to 44 interactions per user per day, indicating deep integration into daily routines rather than one-off usage.

Arabic emerged as the leading language, with 60% of users interacting primarily in Arabic, followed by 28% using English-only mode and 12% preferring bilingual usage.

Arabic-language interactions were dominated by general conversation, accounting for 45% of usage, followed by content playback at 22%, and religious features representing 7% of interactions. In English, general conversation accounted for 34% of interactions, content playback for 32%, and time-management tasks such as alarms, timers, and reminders for 8%.

B2B Technology & AI Infrastructure

In 2025, Yango Tech strengthened its position as a key enabler of AI-driven transformation for businesses. In the Middle East, this included strategic collaborations in the region’s retail and food-tech sectors. Yango Tech partnered with ROOTS and signed a strategic agreement with Grand Hypermarkets to deploy its full e-grocery automation stack across 95 outlets in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, and announced a strategic partnership with noon to scale autonomous robotic delivery across GCC markets.

In Dubai alone, Yango’s delivery robots completed over 1,300 km of autonomous travel — equivalent to roughly the distance from Dubai to Riyadh and back — demonstrating rapid delivery performance (e.g., average delivery times of ~7 minutes for meals and ~14 minutes for groceries across mapped zones) and readiness for wider deployment.

Navigation

Over the course of the year, Yango Maps users navigated a total distance of 2.8 million kilometers across the region, representing an increase of approximately 25% compared to 2024. Engagement with the platform also intensified as users built more than 29 million routes, highlighting its role in both routine commuting and longer journeys. Search activity surged throughout the year, with over 235 million search queries processed in 2025, marking a 38% increase year-on-year. These trends point to rising demand for real-time, accurate navigation and location-based services across diverse urban environments.