Thinking about localizing your android app, well it is without a
doubt a great way to popularize your app. Localization is one of the
fastest growing trends in the app world today.
Localization is a process to provide resources for your app in
accordance with the language setting of the device. The need to provide
support of local language on the app is due to the fact that most users
prefer reading and communicating in their local language.
Before you jump into this localizing wagon make sure what you want
from your app. You want to target only the local audience or global
audience as well?
Localizing your app is only beneficial if you’re targeting different
regions with variety of languages. In order to appeal to more-and-more
users, your app should support texts, currency, audio files, numbers,
and graphics according to the locales.
If you want to make your android app global, you need to support
local languages. For this you require resource files that are placed in
the subdirectories of “res” folder. An additional directory is created
inside “res/” which enables you to use a resource in a particular
locale. Inside this directory, include a hyphen along with an ‘ISO 639-1
language codes’ at the end of the directory name. After this you can
add two optional letters ‘ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 region code’ (preceded by
‘r’).
The inclusion of region qualifier helps in hitting the target
resource more effectively. For instance, use ‘-es-rES’ for Espana
(Spanish spoken in Spain) and ‘-es-rUS’ for Estados Unidos (Spanish
spoken in Latin America), instead of ‘-es’ the language qualifier for
Spanish.
Now, when the user runs the app and the device’s language matches the
language you have specified, the language resources are loaded.
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