LiLak connects professionals, merchants and specialists to the people who actually need them — matched by city and specialisation instead of an open follower graph. Arabic-first with full RTL, live on both stores since 2023.
Audience figures — users, downloads, daily actives, messages sent — are deliberately absent from this page. They belong to the client, and we publish only what is externally verifiable or structurally true of the build.
LiLak is a social platform for intellectuals, professionals and merchants. Members share short-form content, message each other directly, and are discovered by the people near them working in the same field — a plumber, a consultant or a shop reaches the community that can actually hire or buy from them, not an audience of strangers.
The client wanted the full social product, not a prototype: real-time messaging, user-generated video and images at scale, moderation to keep it safe as it grew, and an admin dashboard they could run the platform from without calling an engineer.
A specialist posting to a general social network is shouting into a feed tuned for scale, not for relevance — the people who need that specific service in that specific city are the least likely to see it. And every mainstream platform treats Arabic as a translation applied to a left-to-right design, so the language reads right but the interface never quite does.
Two decisions shaped the whole product: what determines who sees a post, and which direction the interface is designed in. Everything else — sockets, media, moderation — followed from committing to those two early.
Reach is scoped to where a member is and what they do, so a merchant's audience is the community that can actually walk into the shop — not a follower count that flatters nobody.
Arabic and English with full right-to-left layouts throughout, built as a first-class direction rather than a mirrored afterthought bolted onto finished screens.
Socket.io carries direct messaging and live triggers, so conversation and notification arrive as events rather than as something the app has to keep asking for.
User-generated video and images move through cloud storage and processing on AWS, so an upload doesn't block the feed and the app doesn't become the bottleneck as content grows.
An Angular admin dashboard with content moderation, user management and reporting — because a social platform without moderation tooling stops being shippable the moment it gets traction.
Gamification, push notifications, transactional email and deep links that open the exact post or conversation — the difference between a notification and a return visit.
The app has been on the App Store since April 2023 and is still shipping — version 3.0.4 went out in June 2026.
Every social product answers one question first: who sees a post. Copy the global answer — an open follower graph and an engagement-ranked feed — and you get a familiar product that is useless to the person it was built for. A specialist with 400 scattered followers has reach on paper and no customers.
The result is a smaller number that means more: an audience defined by proximity and profession rather than a follower count. It is also why the platform could ship Arabic-first — the layout direction and the discovery model were both decided before the screens were built, not retrofitted after.
LiLak has been live on the App Store since April 2023 and is still actively shipped — version 3.0.4 landed in June 2026.
Professionals and merchants get an audience defined by city and specialisation, so reach corresponds to people who can actually become customers.
Arabic reads as the primary language rather than a translation, with full RTL layouts throughout and English mirrored from them.
Direct messaging and live triggers run over sockets, so conversation arrives as it happens instead of on a refresh.
User-generated video and images move through AWS cloud storage and processing, keeping media off the app's critical path as content volume grows.
Moderation tooling shipped with the platform rather than after it, so growth never had to outrun the ability to keep the community safe.
Gamification, push, email and deep linking bring members back into the exact post or conversation that needs them.
The Angular admin dashboard puts moderation, user management and analytics in the client's hands — day-to-day operation needs no developer.
Building a social or community platform that has to stay real-time?
The app members live in, and the dashboard the client runs the platform from — both reading the same records.
Every tool below shipped to production — no résumé-ware.
A focused community MVP — profiles, a feed, and messaging — starts around $15K with our team. A full social platform like LiLak, with real-time chat, user-generated video, moderation tooling, deep linking and an admin dashboard, is a larger scope and we quote it fixed after a free scoping call. You get a number tied to a written scope rather than an hourly range.
You decide the direction before the screens exist. On LiLak, right-to-left was a first-class layout direction from the start and English was mirrored from it — not the other way round. Retrofitting RTL onto a finished left-to-right product is where most teams lose weeks: every alignment, icon direction, animation and input field has to be revisited, and the result still reads as a translation. Arabic-first is cheaper and better, but only if you commit early.
LiLak runs messaging and live triggers over Socket.io on a Node and Express backend, with Firebase for push. The part founders underestimate is everything around the socket — reconnection, delivery when the app is backgrounded, and deep links that reopen the exact conversation. We build those in from the start, because a chat that loses messages on a subway ride is a chat nobody trusts.
Yes, and it is the single most common thing we see skipped. A social platform without moderation tooling becomes unshippable the moment it gets traction — app stores enforce it, and communities police it whether or not you have given them a mechanism. LiLak launched with review queues and user management already in the admin dashboard, so growth never had to outrun safety.
That is what the admin dashboard is for. LiLak's Angular dashboard covers moderation, user and account management, community administration, notification campaigns and analytics — daily operation involves no engineering. We treat that as part of the build, not an add-on, because the alternative is a client permanently dependent on whoever wrote the code.
We've already solved real-time messaging, media at scale, RTL and moderation.
See exactly how we'd scope yours.
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