5 Things App Developers Should Know About Localization
(Emeryville, CA) – Kee Nethery, founder and CEO of El Loco, a localization service for iOS developers, says that anyone developing an IOS app could boost their sales between 15 to 49 percent if they added just five languages besides English.
That’s based on real data Nethery compiled from users at his other company, Kagi, which has processed payments for Mac developers since 1994.
Here are 5 things iOS developers should know about localization:
1. It’s really really hard. That’s why 65 percent of iOS mobile apps are English only. It can take several months using the full time efforts of more than one programmer to get it right, and that’s just for localizing the code, not including the app translation itself.
2. In the second quarter of 2015, Apple sold more iPhones in China than in the U.S. Yet less than 20 percent of all apps were translated into Chinese, according to recent data for October through November 2015. An app in English only has to compete with 5 to 6 times more similar apps than if it were translated into Chinese.
3. Speaking of Apple, the company offers developers a well-organized way to structure code for 40 different languages as well as developer tools for managing languages in an app. They even offer translation files of all their apps so developers can reuse words Apple has already had professionally translated.
4. Localization requires a whole new set of potentially traumatizing knowledge, like translated strings that get truncated by screen layout and words that can take on wildly inappropriate meanings if placed out of context. Could the time required to localize justify the increase in potential revenues?
5. El Loco offers a service that simplifies the localization process at such a low, monthly rate, developers will earn an immediate boost in revenues from a more global audience. Nethery says that all developers are missing out on a huge market, especially among users of the top six spoken languages – Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Japanese. “Our mission,” he says, “is to make localization so easy and low cost that we can provide localization for all apps – whether iOS or Android – in all languages. That way, everyone around the globe will enjoy the same advantages of technology that English-speaking users do.”
About El Loco – Kee Nethery, El Loco founder and CEO, is also founder and CEO of Kagi, the multilingual online sales platform for thousands of Mac developers since 1994.
From the detailed app sales data, Kee discovered that apps localized into just the top 5 languages saw sales increase by 15 to 50%. Were all their developers to localize, Kagi sales could instantly grow over 30%.
The catch? Only apps localized into at least the top 5 languages deliver this increased revenue, but most developers don’t localize their apps. Attempts to get them to do so showed the hurdle was just too high. For most, the extra income just wasn’t worth the hassle. Tackling the problem head-on, Kagi told developers to zip up their app, send in the code, and Kagi would do all of the work. Offering localization services to developers directly, Kagi learned first-hand how time consuming and difficult software localization was.
The complexity of the process initially made simplification seem impossible, but with focus and determination, the impossible became possible: being able to pull the app apart and visually display HTML recreations of app screens to translators in a web browser.
El Loco was born, a team of seasoned professionals was hired, patents were filed, and customers have proclaimed it a game changer, with increased profits for the developers as a direct result.
We are not competing with the translation houses listed on the Apple web site; our true competition is developers thinking that localization is too difficult to even try.
Apple has provided localization resources to developers for a long time with little progress toward getting developers to localize their apps. Developers just want their code to run. Even doing things like reviewing localization guidelines feels a far distant reality. El Loco meets the developers by localizing their code and then letting them choose their own translators, whose job is vastly simplified when the code is localized first.
We have launched our service for iOS apps first, but our ultimate goal is to provide localization for all apps in all languages.
The rest is history in the making. The future of software is global. El Loco delivers the world.
For more information, see https://www.elloco.com
Media Contact:
Sylvia Paull
Phone: (510) 527-0450
Mobile: (510) 388-8932
