Idea Growr

My view point is that it's better to have a mediocre translation, then to have no translation. It's not a complicated app, so if you are a kid in Thailand with ideas, you just need some texts that are good enough.

So I decided to translate the app in all languages using Google Translate.

• Google spreadsheets hold the values for the keys and main English translation.
• The cells are automatically translated to all languages using Google Translate (=GOOGLETRANSLATE($B91, "en", BS$1).
• A custom python script then downloads these spreadsheets as .tsv files, parses it and writes the stings.xml files for each language.

The neat thing is that if I know a translation can be improved, I can just remove the GOOGLETRANSLATE(..) line, and replace it with the correct translation.

The result is that Idea Growr usage in countries is like this:

• 22.5% USA
• 8.3% Brazil
• 7.8% Germany
• 5.9% UK
• 5.5% India
• 3.3% Australia
• 2.9% Canada
• 2.8% Netherlands
• 2.3% Mexico
• 2.1% Spain
• 36.6% Other..

Ideas are everywhere!

Some stats:

• Now ~6.5K active device users
• 1.4K ratings, giving it 4.3 out of 5 stars.

There is a somewhat hidden in-app-purchase option to connect to FTP. This results in about 1 sale a week of $5 dollar.

Most users would rather pay for online features, but this requires me to take it from side-project to a project with more real responsibilities, investments and allocated time.

I did make a prototype for a Django based online version with collaboration, but that's perhaps for another post.