Do Arab Startups Really Need An Arabic Interface? [Poll Results]

In the latest poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:
Do Arab startups really need an Arabic interface?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

41% of readers thought it was preferable for the website to have an Arabic interface.
32% of the readers thought it was a must.
20% of them thought that it wasn’t necessary.
– The remaining 8% said they didn’t really care

Personally, I’m somewhere between ‘preferable’ and ‘must’, shifting between the two depending on the case, I guess.

A big percentage of internet users in the Arab world are most comfortable using the Arabic language online, instead of English or French, and deciding not to launch an Arabic interface for a website directly alienates those people, cutting out an important part of the service’s possible target audience, which can’t really be good business-wise no matter how you look at it.