Looking back at 2025 through aggregated usage data offers a practical way to understand how digital services are settling into everyday life across the Middle East and North Africa. Insights drawn from anonymised activity across Yango Group’s platforms point less to dramatic shifts and more to steady patterns: people across the region increasingly rely on digital tools not for novelty, but for routine needs tied to movement, entertainment, navigation, and basic assistance powered by artificial intelligence. Seen together, the data reflects how technology in MENA is becoming quieter, more functional, and more embedded in daily habits.
Mobility patterns from 2025 illustrate this clearly. Ride-hailing activity across markets such as the United Arab Emiratesand Oman continued to centre on reliability and access rather than premium experiences. Trips to major airports remained among the most common use cases, including Muscat International Airport in Muscat and Dubai and Zayed International Airports across Dubai and Abu Dhabi. At the same time, shopping centres and commercial hubs featured heavily in ride destinations, suggesting that ride-hailing now plays a supporting role in ordinary retail and social routines, not just travel or tourism.
Vehicle choice further reinforced this everyday focus. Economy options dominated across the region, with mid-size sedans such as the Toyota Camry appearing most frequently. Short and predictable pickup times, averaging just a few minutes in cities like Muscat and remaining under six minutes in Abu Dhabi, underline how on-demand transport has shifted from an occasional convenience to part of the urban baseline.
Patterns around smart devices show a similar trend toward regular, repeated use. During the final quarter of 2025, Yango’s voice assistant Yasmina saw sustained daily engagement in the UAE, with users interacting dozens of times per day at peak. Arabic emerged as the dominant language for interaction, accounting for the majority of usage, with conversations, content playback, and religious features forming the core of how people used the assistant. English-language use leaned more evenly between conversation and media playback, with practical tools like alarms and reminders playing a smaller but consistent role. Rather than experimental use, the data suggests these devices are increasingly treated as background utilities in the home.
On the business side, Yango’s technology operations focused on logistics and automation across retail and food delivery. Partnerships with regional retailers such as ROOTS and Grand Hypermarkets expanded automated e-grocery systems across multiple Gulf markets, while collaboration with noon supported further testing of autonomous delivery. In Dubai, delivery robots covered more than 1,300 kilometres during the year, with delivery times measured in minutes rather than hours, indicating operational maturity rather than pilot-stage experimentation.
Navigation data rounded out the picture. In 2025, Yango Maps users collectively travelled millions of kilometres and generated tens of millions of routes, with search activity rising sharply compared to the previous year. This growth points to increasing dependence on real-time navigation for both commuting and longer trips, particularly as cities across MENA continue to expand and diversify.
Taken together, the 2025 data does not suggest a region chasing technology for its own sake. Instead, it reflects a gradual alignment between digital services and everyday needs, where convenience, language accessibility, and consistency matter more than novelty. For MENA users, technology appears less like a headline feature and more like part of the background infrastructure shaping daily life.
