Invisible Localization
Or, How to Make Your App Friendly to Kids and Foreigners.
I’ve begun to notice a surprising trend among sales of my most popular iPhone app, Kineo: A large portion of the people buying it don’t live in the U.S. In my previous life as a Mac developer, barely 10% of the sales I made were outside the U.S, even on apps that were translated into other languages (Blitz, for example, is localized in French and Italian). But on Kineo, it’s nearly 50%. A large sales spike I saw at one point caused my app to climb the charts in Japan for no apparent reason (no recent update, no big reviews). That week, over 70% of my sales were made in Japan alone.
Another thing I noticed, thanks mostly to this glowing review of Kineo (which has a higher Google ranking that Kineo’s webpage itself), is that Kineo is also very popular among parents who let their kids play with their iPhones. Since that review, I moved Kineo into the Games/Kids category, and saw a pretty decent sales jump.
I think that these two things are related. The reason, I think, that these two groups are much more prevalent in Kineo than in my other apps boils down to one point: you don’t have to be able to read English to use it.
Think about it. If you’re too young to read, or just don’t know the language an app is written in, a lot of apps are completely useless to you. Kineo gets around this through a pretty fortunate accident: you don’t need to read anything to use it. Take a look:
In each of these images, I’ve blanked out every English word. On each screen, every single important feature is still there, completely unobstructed. In fact, in the main drawing view, the only thing obscured is the name of the application!
Since the only data I have to compare this to is my Mac apps, it’s quite likely I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I see those videos of babies playing with iPhones and can’t help but think that there’s something there.
