A tutor marketplace app for families in Qatar

The situation

Families in Qatar find tutors the way they find most things: a recommendation on WhatsApp, a name from a friend, a poster in a compound. There is no way to check that the person teaching your child is who they say they are, and no way for a good tutor to be found by anyone outside their own circle. LearnHow is the app that fixes both halves: parents find tutors, and tutors are verified before they appear.

The constraint

Children. That one word decides most of the architecture. The data of a child under thirteen cannot sit in a region the QFC Data Protection Office does not recognise as adequate, which rules out the fastest managed backends because their nearest region is Mumbai. The app has to pass Apple's strictest review category, user-generated content plus minors, which means account deletion, reporting, blocking and legal pages in both languages before the first external user. And every screen has to hold in Arabic and English, light and dark, on a phone, a folding phone and a 13-inch iPad.

What we built

An app for iOS and Android, built screen by screen against a specification, with the data held in a managed database in the Gulf region, the nearest on the adequacy list. Discovery of tutors by subject and area, shown on a map by neighbourhood and never by address. Tutor profiles with a credential system where the badge a tutor earns depends on how the credential was checked, not who issued it: a registry check, a reviewed certificate and an identity match are three different claims and are shown as three different things. Sign-in with consent to terms and privacy before the first code is sent. Profile editing, settings, and the four compliance screens Apple requires.

How we handled the hard part

Trust is the product, so we refused to let it drift. Gold appears only on the registry tier and nowhere else; the moment it also marked a document check it would stop meaning anything. Every user-facing string lives in the localisation files for both languages with a note on where it appears, because the Arabic for "Book" differs between a button and a heading. Layout is directional throughout, so Arabic mirrors itself rather than being flipped. And every component is rendered in all four language and theme combinations in a test that fails when a pixel moves, so a screen that looks right once stays right.

What changed

The app is in build. Thirteen of the specified screens plus the compliance screens are complete. This page will carry launch dates and, if the client agrees, usage figures once it is live.

What we would tell the next client

Decide where the data lives before you choose a backend. A managed database in the wrong region is a week of speed followed by a rebuild. And treat App Store compliance screens as phase one, not a checklist for later: an app with children on it does not get through review without them.