Localization – a way to become a featured app on iTunes

You are a small team of developers and wondering how your app can beat those top developers’ apps and appear on iTunes App Store as a featured app? Carrot, a new productivity app that just got into the featured list, may have some insights for you.

Carrot, developed by Hong Kong startup Innopage, is an app where you can track and reward yourself for achieving your life’s to-do, goals and endeavors. Just like many of the developers out there, the next thing to do after shipping your app is to think of ways to attract more downloads and to climb up the different country top charts.

Downloads increased by 800% after localization

After reading researches showing that a lot of country top charts are dominated by apps that support the local language, Innopage decided that localization was the way to go to capture more international downloads. To begin with, they translated their app into 6 languages other than English, including French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

The result was very encouraging, just a few days after adding the above translation, downloads increased by 800% and the overall rankings in the above countries jumped significantly.

Became a featured app on iTunes after localization

Localization did not only help Carrot increase its downloads. Just a few days after adding the localized versions, Carrot became a featured app in iTunes App Store for 48 countries!

Keith Li, the CEO of Innopage, said “I will imagine that we, as a very small team based out of Hong Kong, wouldn’t be possible to get featured worldwide unless we do all those translations”.

Translating your app is easy with OneSky

Keith mentioned that the whole translation process was much easier than he expected. Using OneSky, all he needed to do was to upload his .strings files, choose the languages and our system would automatically parse the file to extract the human readable text and send them out for translation. With OneSky, you can forget about all the time-consuming file format conversions and you don’t have to worry whether the translators can handle those complicated code files.

“Another reason why we like OneSky is that there are many built-in features that help ensure translation quality. For examples, I can create a list of glossary terms and attach screenshots to provide more guidelines to translators. There is also an automatic placeholder validation system to ensure our translation contains no missing / misspelled placeholders. And the platform makes it very easy for me to communicate with the translators to clarify issues,” said Keith.

The whole translation process took less than 2 days to finish and Innopage could simply download the completed translation in ready-to-use resource files format and plug them into their app directly.

 With this promising result, Innopage is now planning to translate their app into more languages. Love the app and would like it to be translated into your language as well? Send us an email at support@oneskyapp.com and we will forward your voice to them!

More about Innopage

Innopage (www.innopage.com) is a multi-award winning, fast growing and leading Mobile Applications Developer specialized in iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Smart TV applications development.

Innopage is a member of Hong Kong Cyberport Incubation Programme, and had received support from Hong Kong government’s Innovation and Technology Fund.

More about OneSky

OneSky (www.oneskyapp.com) is a cloud-based translation management platform with the mission to become the easiest way for companies to go global. We offer advanced technology to streamline the localization process for websites, mobile apps, softwares, social media & documents.

• Professional translation service for 40+ languages

• Manage your own translators & collaborate easily with our web-based translation editor

• Crowdsourcing solutions to engage your users in the localization process

Translation made easy – our simple yet powerful promise to you. Contact us at support@oneskyapp.com for more info.