Building Apps for Users in Bangladesh

An app designed and tested on a fast office connection and the newest phone meets a different reality in a bus in Dhaka or a shop in a district town. Building for users in Bangladesh means planning for the devices, networks, language and payment habits people actually have.

Android first, and mid-range

Most smartphone users in Bangladesh are on Android, and many on affordable phones with limited memory and storage. Test on those devices, not just on the developers' own. Watch app size, because people uninstall large apps to free space, and watch memory, because a low-end phone closes background apps aggressively.

Networks that come and go

Connections drop, slow down and recover, and mobile data costs money. Apps should:

• show cached content immediately rather than a spinner;
• retry quietly instead of failing on the first timeout;
• keep images small and load them as needed;
• never lose what the user typed because a request failed.

Much of this is what we mean by offline-first, and it helps users everywhere.

Bangla done properly

Supporting Bangla is more than translating strings. Check that fonts render conjuncts correctly on every device, that layouts survive longer or taller text, and that search works with Bangla input. Decide whether numbers and dates appear in Bangla or English digits, and be consistent. Many users switch between both languages, so let them choose rather than guessing from the phone's settings.

Sign-in by phone number

Phone numbers are often more natural than email addresses here. One-time codes by SMS are familiar, but plan for delays and for numbers that change hands, and make account recovery possible without the original SIM.

Local payments

Mobile wallets such as bKash and Nagad are part of daily life, alongside cards and cash on delivery. Supporting the methods your users already use, and confirming every payment on your server, matters more than a polished checkout. We cover the details in integrating bKash and SSLCommerz.

Support where users already are

Many customers would rather message than fill in a form or write an email. Making it easy to reach a person by phone or chat builds trust quickly, especially for a new app.

We are a Dhaka studio, and our own apps include a health app in Bengali and English. If you are building for this market, our mobile engineers know it first-hand.