Taking Your Mobile App Global

People want hard facts, brand information and entertainment, and more and more want it all in the palm of their hand. The market for mobile apps is exploding. Most reports peg the market’s value at $20 billion and growing fast. Very fast. In 2011, mobile devices outsold PCs.

And a lot of that growth is global. Edith Yeung, Head of Marketing for Dolphin Browser, cites a Flurry Analytics study (December 2011) shows that “eight out of the top 10 largest iPhone and Android markets are not English-speaking.”

For mobile app developers, “should I localize?” is no longer the question. Now they're asking “What is the best way to localize?" The short answer: internationalization.

Internationalization (or i18n as we call it around here) means identifying and eliminating any and all glitches that might crop up in localization. When localizing your app, i18n will reduce costs and time-to-market.

Here are just some things to consider:

Context: Mobile devices have smaller screens with lower resolution than a PC. To give you an idea, desktop screens can measure from 14” to 42” (viewable diagonal). The most popular screen resolution size worldwide is now 1366 x 768.

As a comparison, here are the display specs of five top-selling mobile devices:

Why does this matter? Translations from English into many other languages can be from 5% to 40% longer. Also, characters in some languages are relatively complex and may need to display at a higher resolution to be readable. Other things to consider include:

Code: Concatenated strings, an approach that streamlines apps in one language, should be avoided at all cost if you want to go global.

Text: Font enhancements (bold, italics, underlining) are not supported by many devices. Just as well...these enhancements can also distort the characters of some writing systems.

Images: Portable formats for images makes sense in a one-language context, but editability is what counts in localization. For mobile apps, text in images needs eliminated or made easily editable and translatable.

Content: Ensuring that one term only means one thing is a cardinal rule of effective technical writing. As an i18n strategy, a fixed terminology makes translation and debugging mistranslations easier.

Testing: Apps that might meet visual and ergonomic specs, and function perfectly in English, may bug in other languages. The best way to search out and destroy i18n-related software bugs is to conduct a pseudolocalization test. Remember that, for mobile apps, the number of operating systems available — iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows OS — will be a testing multiplier.

Mobile app i18n can go much deeper. HandyGames, a German developer, discovered the power of “cute” in the China. Their i18n strategy has paid off. Since launching “Clouds & Sheep” just over two weeks ago, the game has been a top seller in China’s Apple stores.