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.