How Googly Player Gets 17 Languages Right on Android, From Picker to Plurals

Adding a language picker to an Android app looks like an afternoon's work: a list, a tap, a locale change. The failures arrive later, and most of them are quiet. A user picks Arabic and the screen stays in English. A counter shows its number on the wrong side of its label. The notification from a background service keeps speaking the system language while the activity in front of it has switched.

None of this crashes. Nothing appears in the logs. The person who chose a language other than their phone's concludes that the app does not really support it, and that is the end of the relationship.

Googly Player, our Android app for the videos, music and photos on your device, ships 17 languages behind its own picker, entirely independent of the system language. This is an account of what doing that properly involved: how the picker labels languages, the API that applies the choice everywhere, a build setting that would otherwise break it without a trace, and the string rules that keep Arabic, Urdu and Russian correct.

Seventeen languages, chosen inside the app

The picker is a full in-app selector. It does not read the phone's language and stop there: a device set to English can run Googly Player in Bengali, and a device set to Turkish can run it in Japanese. The two settings are separate on purpose, so the app's language is whatever the person using it picks.

These are the languages it ships, each listed by its own name:

• English, Hindi (हिन्दी), Spanish (Español), Arabic (العربية), French (Français), Bengali (বাংলা)
• Portuguese (Português), Russian (Русский), Urdu (اردو), Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), German (Deutsch)
• Japanese (日本語), Turkish (Türkçe), Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt), Korean (한국어), Italian (Italiano), Gujarati (ગુજરાતી)

That set spans several scripts and two right-to-left languages, which is why the rest of this article is about the mechanics rather than the translations themselves. A translated string file is the easy part; making every one of those files reach the device and render correctly is where the work is.

A picker people can find their language in

Every language is listed by its endonym, its own name in its own script, as the primary label, with the English name underneath. Someone looking for Gujarati sees ગુજરાતી first. That matters most for the person who has opened the app in a language they cannot read and needs to find their way back: the label they recognise is the one written in their own script.

The list is searchable, and a Suggested section at the top is built from the device locale, so the likeliest choices sit where the eye lands first. Arabic and Urdu names are anchored correctly for right-to-left text inside the picker itself, rather than being forced into the left-aligned layout their neighbours use.

One setting for the whole process

The common shortcut is to change the locale on the current activity. It works on the screen you are looking at and nowhere else. Googly Player plays media in the background through a foreground media playback service, posts a media notification, and uses bottom-sheet dialogs throughout. An activity-only locale change would leave every one of those in the old language.

We apply the choice process-wide through AppCompatDelegate.setApplicationLocales. That covers services, notifications and dialogs as well as activities, so the playback notification on the lock screen and the dialog that pops over the player use the same language as the library behind them. There is one place where the language is set, and everything in the process reads from it.

Android 13 and later: the system knows too

Android 13 introduced per-app languages at the platform level, and on those devices we hand the choice to the platform rather than keeping it to ourselves. Pick a language inside Googly Player and it also appears under Settings › Apps › Googly Player › Language. Change it there and the app follows.

The practical effect is that there is never a disagreement between what the app shows and what the system says about it. A user who forgets where they changed the language can find it in either place, and the system's own language screen stays an accurate record of how the app is configured. On older devices the in-app picker does the whole job on its own.

Every translation ships in the base APK

This is the failure that would have cost the most to find. By default, an Android App Bundle splits resources by language, and Play delivers only the resources matching the device's system language. For most apps that saves a little space. For an app with its own language picker it is fatal, because the translations the user is choosing between were never installed.

The symptom gives nothing away. Pick Russian on an English phone, and the picker renders everything in English. No crash, nothing in the logs, no error to search for. So we disable language splits in the App Bundle deliberately, and every translation ships in the base APK. Each of the 17 languages is on the device from the first install, whatever the system language happens to be.

Numbers that sit where the language expects them

Every count in Googly Player is formatted, never concatenated. The string resource reads “Total Videos: %d” and the number is substituted into it; the code never builds “Total Videos: ” followed by the number glued on the end. The difference looks cosmetic in English and is wrong in Arabic and Urdu, where concatenation puts the number on the wrong side of the label.

A format string lets each translation decide where the number goes. The Arabic translator places the placeholder where Arabic grammar and right-to-left reading put it, and the code does not need to know. That rule applies across the app, so the library counts and the sectioned search results, such as “Videos · 12” or “Photos · 87”, follow the language rather than the code's word order.

Plurals and right-to-left layouts

A format string solves position but not grammar. Arabic uses six grammatical forms for a number and Russian four, and no single format string can express that: “%d videos” is only right for some values. Googly Player uses proper Android plural resources, so each translation supplies every form its language needs and the platform picks the correct one for the count.

Arabic and Urdu also get full right-to-left support, which reaches as far as the language picker itself, where their names are anchored correctly. Taken together with formatting and plurals, this is what separates an app that has Arabic strings from one that reads naturally in Arabic.

What it needs, and how to switch languages

Googly Player runs on Android. The in-app picker works on its own on every supported version, because every translation is installed with the app. On Android 13 and later the choice is also shared with the system, so it shows up in the per-app language screen. Nothing about the language setting needs an account or a network connection; the translations are part of the installed app, and the app's own permission prompts state that nothing is uploaded and everything stays on the device.

1. Open the language picker

   It sits inside Googly Player, independent of your phone's system language.

2. Find your language

   Check the Suggested section built from your device locale, search the list, or look for the language's own name in its own script.

3. Select it

   The choice applies across the app, including background playback notifications and dialogs.

4. On Android 13 or later, use either place

   The same setting appears under Settings › Apps › Googly Player › Language, and changing it there changes the app.

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