Sunday, November 20, 2011

The #Wikipedia challenge for an AppStore


When an application has been developed, tested and ready, it gets into an AppStore. Except that a developer develops and when he is done it still needs to be localised.

As Wikipedia exists in over 270 languages, you can imagine that the localisation for any application is a continuous process at translatewiki.net. The challenge for all the AppStores; support this continuous stream of new localisations.

Even existing users of a Wikipedia application may be in need for new and improved localisations. Really how are these stores going to cope ??
Thanks,
      GerardM

1 comment:

brion said...

It's probably fairly sensible to allow fetching & updating localizations separately from the app.

This requires a few things though:
* app has to request general internet access (this is a distinct permission on Android)
* app probably can't rely on the native platform's localizable resource systems, since those files are probably locked

In our own case -- the in-progress Android app for Wikipedia -- our UI logic is all in JavaScript with our own files, we already have internet access, and we could in theory fetch updated localization files at any time.

(No that's not done at this time, but it could be. :)