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Comment by TheCoreh | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what is the reasoning behind such rollouts? Localization?

I really hope not. I'm not saying localization isn't important, but holding back an English app because of this is something I don't understand. A huge part of the world speaks English just fine. Release first, localize later if it's not possible right away. This is probably not the case here, but I hate it when devs forget that the US isn't the entire world that they're releasing their app to.

Heck it could even be a great teaching aid for English!

Also some of us don't even like to have the software localized. English is not my mother tongue and it's not an official language where I live either but I always set the system language to American English on my computers and devices.

Same here, I couldn't care less about a German translation. I'm not going to see it if it's not the only language the app comes with.

I do however prefer a German locale as in number, time, units, etc.

Localization != translation. Especially when it's a machine vision app that's supposed to be useful locally.

You are right. Internationalization might be the word for what I'm talking about, though some might argue that that's not correct either because they might say that l10n is a subset of i18n. Not quite sure. But anyways, yes, l10n in the sense that it works in my part of the world is desirable. I18n if only taken to mean translation (and things like right-to-left and such which arise from supporting certain languages) is what doesn't matter to me.

Because if you don't release an localized app you receive bad ratings that people never update.

Not a bad point, I hadn't thought about that, but you do still have the option of flushing all reviews with an update if they're primarily negative.

Also flushing people's memories? Seriously, marketing and PR is a human problem, stop treating it as an engineering one.

It's not about just language, of course. Otherwise "localization" would be called "translation". But a machine vision AI app isn't very useful if it cannot recognize local signs, brands, whatever, or pronounce them correctly. It would be simply bad publicity.

You're absolutely right, I dismissed this far too early and didn't think far enough for an app like this. Thanks for clearing that up.

I think that must be the case - it isn't available in the UK :)

Yes...translating to Australian is a slow and tedious process.

Hopefully this can be expedited by translating from the New Zealand version which is released. Just lower the prior probability of sheep and you're done!

It's unlikely to be localisation, because you'd expect to see it in the UK store as well.

Some companies only release iOS applications in certain countries to begin with because they want a gradual rollout rather than doing a global launch all at once. The App Store doesn't give you many options in this respect.

Devs often limit regions to slowly ramp up usage, so the servers don't melt down on day one, see Pokemon Go for example.

Presumably licensing and legal coverage.

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