I would like to take a name for my application from itunnesconnect. However, the name that I want to take has been taken by someone else. However, if I change default language from English to UK English, that name becomes available. I wonder what if I take that name with default language "UK English". What would be difference ?
As long as the name is not identical to one already in the store, you can use it. However, it is very hard to find apps in the store even if you know their name, so you might want to think about having a spelling that is not common. e.g If there is already a game called Color It and you want to name yours Colour It, there is a good chance that people who are searching for it will find the other one instead of yours.
I have a game that I’ve sold for years on CD called Show Me. That name was taken in the app store so I call mine Show Me… They are completely different apps, so my customers don’t buy the wrong one by mistake.
I also have one called Train Talk! that is based on my CD game Train Talk (without the !). Again, they are completely different apps and my customers won’t accidentally buy the wrong one.
Related
We already have E commerce app Targeting 3 different countries with 3 different domains. It also uses 3 different DB.
Now we are going for IOS app. So my questions here are:
Can we upload a bundle for specific country only? (Available in that country only, if multiple bundles allowed for single app)
Should we handle JSON based DB request in a single bundle by checking user's location? (so single bundle handled by programming)
Our goal is here our app will allow only specific country's user to place order.
Also prices are different for different countries, prices are from server.
We don't have in app purchase prices.
Please let me know what option is best. Even if new please suggest.
Its a broad question with lots of good answers and unfortunately all of them are opinion based but I will give my two cents.
You can absolutely create multiple apps and target a specific country. You control this by changing the availability preference. (see pic) This will allow the app to be shown only in a certain country.
The advantage of this method is that you can have complete control & customizability specific to a country.
The disadvantage is that you are now maintaining multiple code bases. If you have a code bug in one app then you need to update 3 apps to fix the "same" bug. What if you want to support more countries. Now you have to create that many clones of the app. Think about if you had to add a new feature. Its snowballs pretty quickly doesn't it?
If you make one app then there is only one code base, one place to make all code changes or add features. Its somewhat easy to maintain code wise.
The bad side, well now you have to take care of every possible country specific scenario either within the app e.g. Localizations, currencies etc. or you have to get that information from your servers.
There are ways to find out through apis from which country a user is connecting from without asking the user itself.
In my opinion, creating one app is the way to go. It will save you lots of headaches down the road. But having said that I don't know how UBER or others big international players handle their country specific apps. Do they have one app or many. That I don't know.
I've noticed that quite a few apps don't (big ones mainly).
Does anyone have any experience doing/not doing this? If you haven't localised your app's title, has the localisation still improved your number of downloads?
For example, say my app was called "Month Planner" - what would the pros and cons of translating this be?
Not really a programming question so I doubt it should be here, but... you are talking about branding. Naming your app as something recognizable as the app. "Month Planner" is not a good name for an app, it is a description of what the app does.
You want your app to have a single global name, so when a user searches "MyApp Name" it doesn't matter what the language is, your app will be found.
So do:
Give your app a unique name
Localize app descriptions
Don't:
Give your app a generic function name in English or some other language.
Change the name of your app based on location (unless you want different brands in different places, but that's another kettle of fish).
Avoid:
Generic, obvious or dictionary names. It'll only end in trouble when your brand collides with that of someone else (see Apple Corps v Apple Computer for a famous example).
For example, say my App Store description is Titled: "Big Bobs Bowling". But due to space restrictions, the bundle display name (what is displayed under the icon when installed) has no spaces and is "BigBobsBowling".
I understand that the App Store description Title gets included in the App Store Search. But would it be a good practice to include "BigBobsBowling" as a keyword, in the event someone searches based on seeing the installed icon? Or does the search function somehow account for this? I am keeping in mind that I do not want to waste valuable keyword characters.
Based on my experience, you don't need to add the keyword BigBobsBowling in your App Store Keywords. If someone searches that term your app will be found.
For info, one of my app is titled Market Impulses but if I search the term MarketImpulses I found it (I didn't define that term as a keyword).
You can focus your remaining keywords characters to your ASO :-)
I don't know if my approach to this is fundamentally wrong, but I'm struggling to get my head around a (seemingly trivial?!) localisation issue.
I want to display the title of a 'System' UITabBarItem (More, Favorites, Featured, etc...) in a navigation bar. But where do I get the string from? The strings file of the MainWindow.nib doesn't contain the string (I didn't expect it to) and reading the title of the TabBarItem returns nil, which is what stumped me.
I've been told, there's no way to achieve it and I'll just have to add my own localised string for the terms in question. But I simply don't (want to) believe that!! That's maybe easy enough in some languages, but looking up, say, "More" in already presents me with more than one possible word in some languages. I'm not happy about simply sending these words for translation either, because it still depends on the translator knowing exactly which term Apple uses. So am I missing something simple here? What do other people do?
Obviously, setting the system language on my test device and simply looking to see what titles the Tab Items have is another 'obvious' possibility. But I really have a problem with half baked workarounds like that. That'll work for most languages, but I'm really gonna have fun when it comes to Russian or Japanese.
I'm convinced there must be a more reliable way to do this. Surely there must be a .strings file somewhere in the SDK that has these strings defined?
Thanks in advance...
Rich
The simple and unfortunate answer is that aside from a very few standard elements (e.g. a Back button), you need to localize all strings yourself. Yes, UIKit has its own Localization.strings file but obviously that's outside of your app sandbox so you don't have access to it.
I filed a bug with Apple years ago about providing OS-level localization for common button titles, tab item labels, etc. That bug is still open but obviously they haven't done it yet (sorry, I don't have the radar # handy).
I am designing a localized web app. I am leaning on auto-detect browser language setting. But I notice a number of respectable sites asking the user to select a language. Is there any usability issue you know of (from actual experiences out there) with just auto-detecting user language?
Thanks.
Give me a choice
Remember my choice
Use the auto-detect as default
Make transition easy
In many situation I prefer or even need the "original" over my local one, bad translations or different content being the major reason.
If you register multiple domains, you can base your auto-detect on that: When foo.com redirects me to foo.de, or otherwise shows me a german interface, it is actively ignoring my choice to go to foo.com.
MSDN did insist on showing me atrocious automatic translations and ALWAYS made me click to go to the readable, understandable english one (that's a step up: when they introduced it, the default selection for changing the language was something like Afrikaans).
Make transition easy: i.e. make it easy to go to the counterpart of the current page in a different language. Amazon often succeeds when I change ".com" to ".de", but then it fails to lead me to the german translation of the item. That's not always possible, as that requires each local view having the same structure and a 1:1 page mapping. But generally, you have to weight above requirements against other constraints of the project.
[edit] MSDN got better now :)
I would suggest to autodetect the language and display the site in this language or the default languge (probably english) if the translation is not available. Additionally present the user with a selection of languages on top or bottom of your page. The names of the languages should be written in the target language.
Don't do it like that: English, German, Italian.
But: English, Deutsch, Italiano.
Obviously there is the usability problem that you might detect a language that the user doesn't understand. How are you going to do the detection? Don't think everybody has their browser set to the correct language. IP-Adresses are also a very bad indicator for the users language.
Practical example: YouTube tried to convince me for a week or so to use the Japanese version, though I can't read Japanese. Not very helpful. Microsoft is also determined to serve me automatically translated versions of there documentation when I just want to read the English one.
So don't try to tell your users which language they're supposed to prefer, let them decide for themselves.
I really hate non-configurable auto-detection because a lot of applications are translated more than imperfectly. I would rather read perfect English than bad Russian. For example, some terms do not translate in a reasonable way, and trying to translate everything makes localized version faintly ridiculous.
Also some applications can not translate new features fast enough, leading to a mixed language.
So I always prefer to have a choice, and choose the version that is native to the application author -- for the best language (unless it is a language I do not know).
Update:
One situation when it has gone beyond ridiculous is DB2 (or its client tools, not sure), which forced me to install a Russian version, but all errors in this version were shown as "???????? ??? ??? ??".
Yes: at work, we have a Windows XP deployed with 'English' language (because we have worldwide site and only one kind Windows to deploy with only one kind of settings when it comes to language).
Yet all out applications must run in French. The auto-detect feature alone would not be enough for an appropriate display of the labels.
Sometimes when you are trying to describe something to a user over the phone and you are in a different location, it is very annoying when you are both looking at the same URL, but see different results. You might even go so far as to include the language in the URL similar to how wikipedia does it (e.g. en.wikipedia.org).
Also sometimes a user will be on a friend's computer and try to access a website but won't see it in their preferred language, because of the language settings on the computer.
I think the best solution would be to allow the user to override the setting, but default it to the auto-detected language.
I agree that the auto-detect is not enough.
Not many users know the settings for selecting their language. Therefore the settings will often be the default and therefore incorrect (for non-english users).