Doing Mobile App Localization Right: Baby Daybook

When we became parents in 2014, my wife searched for a mobile app to help manage baby care: feeding, sleep, diaper changing, and other activities.

After trying a few apps, she settled on Baby Daybook by Drilly Apps. It indeed turned out to be very convenient for parenting in the first few months, but here I wanted to praise its developers for doing localization right:

• The app is translatable at OneSky. It’s one of many other localization sites existing today. It’s probably less famous than Crowdin and Transifex, but pretty fine functionally, and I have not particular complaints about it. (And of course, it’s a bit of a competitor of translatewiki.net, where I am one of the maintainers, but that’s OK—competition is healthy.)
• Any volunteer can log in with a GitHub account and start translating to any language.
• Translation review is available, but not required. Submitted translations go into the next released version whether reviewed or not. This is good, because bad translations are actually very rare, and many languages have very few dedicated translation maintainers, often just one, so demanding translation review is usually just harmful and unnecessary overhead.
• The developers quickly answer my emails when I ask them for clarification about string meanings, and when I suggest changes in the English string. Recently I suggested changing “Thousands of happy moms use this app to track breastfeedings and sync data” to “Thousands of happy parents use this app to track breastfeedings and sync data”, and they immediately changed it.
• App descriptions for the Google Play store are fully translatable. This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but almost all apps use a machine translation, which is almost always wrong, often embarrassingly so. I saw some very popular apps, used by millions of people, having Hebrew and Russian descriptions that are worse than useless. For a lot of apps it would be better to just leave the English description. Luckily, Baby Daybook does the right thing and allows translators write a complete description for every language.
• Translators get a free pro account in the app, with extra features. (This worked for me the last time I checked, in 2014; I haven’t checked recently, but I have no reason to think that it changed.)

All of the above things are really easy and sensible, but for some reason most app developers don’t do this.

App developers, please learn from Drilly Apps how to do it right.

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