Tauhoko i Android

Supporting te reo Māori on Trade Me for Android (and why it’s such a challenge)

Trade Me for Android has begun to learn a little te reo Māori! We’ve held off translating the app until now due to the lack of Māori language support in Android devices, but thanks to a little bit of development magic, we will soon be able to offer te reo to all our Android users. For the moment, though, you will only be able to use the app in te reo Māori if your device supports it — at the time of writing, this is limited to a few Huawei devices only.

Similarly to the iOS app before it, Trade Me for Android will only show te reo in some of the most used parts of the app to begin with, but we’ll continue to translate more and more of the app over time.

Supporting te reo on all Android devices

While the Android platform has built-in support for a huge number of languages, the devices shipped by manufacturers support a much smaller number. The reason for this is because manufacturers have to ensure that all the custom software they put on their device — including device settings, the phone app, the text messaging app, and so on — is translated into each of the languages they support. This is a huge amount of work, which means manufacturers need to make tough decisions about which languages make the cut. Unfortunately for us Kiwis, te reo Māori is rarely one of them.

The good news is, Android is a very flexible development platform. Although you may not be able to set your device’s language to te reo Māori, we can trick our app into thinking your device is fluent! We can do this by overriding the locale set in the application’s configuration at runtime, manually setting te reo as your preferred language for every screen in the app. Combined with the ability to set your preferred language from our app settings, you’ll be able to use Tauhoko regardless of which device you choose.

Android developers: if you’re interested in supporting te reo Māori in your apps, get in touch. We’ll be sharing more detail about how you can make these changes to your apps soon.

Owners of non-Huawei devices: keep an eye out for future app releases — we’ll be bringing te reo Māori support to all devices very soon.

Mā te wā!

If you want to get in touch with me directly, feel free to reach out on Twitter.