Meet Any.DO

This time we’d like to present to you Any.DO, an app that was recently listed by Business Insider as one of the hot apps right now. We talked with Yoni Lindenfeld, Any.DO’s VP of Engineering.

 

 

 

 

Q1. Tell us about Any.DO!

At Any.DO we focus our efforts on building simple yet effective productivity tools with a big focus on mobile platforms. Our award winning To-Do application was launched in November 2011 and since than has been downloaded by millions of users. The application has been listed as one of the best apps for 2012 by Apple and has been featured a couple of times in Google play. Our vision through our set of products is to help our users get their things done in smart contextual ways. We are building all kinds of smart tools (some of them yet to be released) to make this vision come true.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

I am one of the co-founders and the VP of Engineering here at Any.DO. I come from a technological background and take care of the entire development efforts of the company. Our localization process was

first based mostly on professional translators, making it a time consuming and expensive process. I was looking for an alternative service that will allow us to leverage our big community of users to help us localize our products faster, cheaper and to more languages.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

We have been using Get Localization for a few months now, and the results are amazing. We already got more than a hundred translators on the system translating our products and adding new languages that weren’t supported yet. We still can’t base our entire localization process on the community but hopefully as more and more translators join we will be less and less dependent on professional translation services.

Q4. Would you have localization tips or best practices that you would
like to share?

My biggest tip would be to try and get as many translators to the system as possible – our way to do it is to actively approach our most dedicated users suggesting they become a translator. We also wanted a better way to access our group of translators so we created a Google group for all of them so we can announce new releases of the app that requires translation (this works great – maybe in the future this will be a part of the Get Localization service).

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks Yoni for sharing your experiences with Get Localization!

Please check out Any.DO or why not support them by signing up for translations.

Localizing Android applications

Android is currently fastest growing mobile OS. There’s no official numbers of Android geographical distribution but AdMob has released their monthly mobile metrics report with data of Android and iPhone device usage by country. We’ve discussed of iPhone localization in our previous post with older AdMob data so we will update that based on this data as well. However this post is now concentrating on Android.

Android geographical distribution

As we are localization blog, we are interested whether you need to localize your Android applications or not. So lets start by looking the geographical distribution.

Please Note that this data is based on AdMob report that is only measuring how many devices are making requests in their ad network. Due to the fact that AdMob ads are mostly shown in US websites this data is for sure skewed towards US. However I believe the data can give us a good direction.

As expected, United States and China are the biggest countries. Following United Kingdom and France. Distribution is not that highly fragmented as for example on iPhone and Symbian. With just English you can roughly reach 80% of the whole market.  Based on AdMob data, this would mean only 2M+ Android devices you don’t reach. It’s not that much if you also consider how many are willing to install or purchase apps (or even can because of platform fragmentation).

So I guess there’s no need to localize?

Well it depends how you look into this. Android is growing really fast and in coming years especially in Europe and Asia. With localization you can quite easily buy some fan base for your application in those countries. For now, it’s not about growing your market but basically providing good quality apps for your customers in hope of bigger market in the future.

Of course, in case you are Chinese or European developer make sure your app is available in English.

As being said, market is changing rapidly so we will follow these developments closely in the future here in Get Localization Blog as well.