The emerging apps market both for Android as well as iOS continues to grow and it’s difficult to know when it’ll reach its ceiling, or if it ever will. If there’s one thing we can learn from the statistics on downloads, it’s that there is enough demand to satisfy a constantly renewed supply.
Trusted Translations is one of the main suppliers of localization services of Android apps for developers within Google Play. Developers can choose to localize their Android apps with us on the same platform they use to publish their apps.
For Google Play apps, countries such as Japan, Korea, Brazil and Russia top the growth index as far as downloads are concerned. Nonetheless, the United States and China remain on top. The latter country is a special case, as along with Iran, Lichtenstein and Myanmar (also known as Burma) they comprise the locations where payment for apps is not allowed. Therefore, any developer needs to understand that everything downloaded in these places must be free, making it necessary to seek other direct or indirect income sources beforehand.
If you plan to localize an application, it’s a good idea, of course, to first do so into English (if it isn’t the original language). Not only because of the large amount of doors that English per se opens, but also because it is going to be the base language for translating the application to other languages since the database of translators that work from English as the source is broader, which is actually a twofold benefit as where there is greater supply, the price of localization will be cheaper.
And in the event you choose to localize it for the country with the most-spoken language on the planet, as is the case with the People’s Republic of China, you must bear in mind the aforementioned factors and forget about the idea that the user will pay for downloading the application. You have to seek out other direct or indirect income sources because, as of the present (June 2014), Google Play does not offer paid applications in China.
As we are one of the only five providers selected by Google to offer application localization to developers within Google Play, the CEO of Trusted Translations, Richard Estevez, will attend Google I/O 2014 next month, where there will likely be some news regarding the Chinese market, although the star of the conference will surely be Google Glass.
