Smartmobile
market penetration is just accelerating ahead – this year 1,6Bn people will
have smartmobile in their hands. Devices are spreading faster than language of
the tech world - English. Soon the smartmobile market becomes a multicultural
environment, yet a big piece of the ecosystem – smart mobile applications are
still mostly in English.
Most of the
developer community understands English and do not have any experience to be in
discomfort of not knowing the language. Just how do you feel about this: Ha
megérted ezt a mondatot – jelentkezz nálam egy üveg jó Pilsner sörért.
So how many
people have this discomfort? There are no straight statistics available.
Moreover, all app markets are quite shy about this topic. And if you try to find relevant data on the
WEB, only very few articles are discussing it – mostly talking about the effect
of localization, which we discuss in the next post.
So we
decided to do this homework and calculate the population of non-English
speaking smartphone users. For each country we took the
- Population - Wikipedia: List of countries by population
- English knowledge - Wikipedia: EF English Proficiency Index
- Smartphone penetration - Google: Our mobile Planet
We used
estimates for countries not having data based on counterparts in the same geo
and having similar GDP. We simplified the calculation by assuming no
correlation of English knowledge and smartphone ownership. You can argue about
this, but hey, this is just an estimate.
Here is the result:
The chart
tells a lot – almost 3 out of 4 potential users are locked out from fully
understanding your app, if you have only English version.
Moreover 4
out of 5 new smartphone users are not having English knowledge (404M non
English growth v. 507M total growth). And – as we are progressing with cheaper
devices into the 3rd billion of smartphone users – this ratio will
increase further.
So it's
time to think about localization seriously – how much it can help to leverage
the full potential of your app. In the next topic we will look at some success
stories and what users were telling to us. Hope this data is kicking some
thinking; please let me know your thoughts.
Catch you later
Peter
