Sunday, October 25, 2015

Multilingual Mobile Application - How to implement language change


We're building a mobile application that will initially support English and German, perhaps more languages in the future.


My question is what is the best way/most common practice to handle language change in a mobile application.


For example in many web applications there is usually a dropdown in one of the corners, could be top left or top right.


But I believe that would take a lot of space in a mobile app and it is better to have a settings page where the user can change the language. It is also something that won't happen more than 1-2 times, right?


Any thoughts/helpful tips/links?



Answer



When mobile apps have support for several languages, they typically don't allow the language to be changed in app. This is because the user has already made her choice of language by selecting the phone's operating language in system settings. The apps then use this same setting.


Our app works that way as well and we haven't heard any complaints. It seems that people who would want to have the app in English instead of their native language have their whole phone set to English as well.



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