Six Tips for Building Apps in Different Languages

Building apps for a global audience means more than swapping out text—it requires thoughtful localization that makes every screen feel native to users across languages and cultures. These six tips will help you create multilingual apps that truly resonate worldwide.

One powerful approach is using Adalo to streamline your multilingual development process. Adalo is a no-code app builder for database-driven web apps and native iOS and Android apps—one version across all three platforms, published to the Apple App Store and Google Play. This means you can localize once and deploy everywhere, maintaining a single codebase rather than juggling separate versions for each platform and language.

When your localized app launches in the app stores, you unlock massive global audiences and push notifications to keep international users engaged—essential ingredients for app success.

Adalo Experts (our team of app-building freelancers) are located all over the world, and typically work with clients that may want apps in languages other than English. In this blog, we will unpack our best practices to help you with how to build apps in different languages and across different cultures.

How do you localize a mobile app?

Mobile app localization is what allows an app to support multiple languages. Most apps are built with the assumption that users communicate in English, but supporting only English can limit your app in terms of users and downloads. Many potential app users from non-English-speaking countries probably won't even find your app in the app store if the only language it's available in is English. If you're building apps for clients that need an app in a language that you aren't familiar with, you'll need mobile app localization to help you build it out.

Localizing mobile apps goes far beyond simple translation. While translation focuses on converting text from one language to another, localization ensures that the overall user experience—its elements, features, copy, graphics, and descriptions—are all customized to users' language and cultural preferences. With Adalo, an AI-powered app builder, you can create one version of your app that publishes to web, iOS App Store, and Android Play Store, making localization efforts more efficient since you're maintaining a single codebase rather than separate versions for each platform.

Localization shouldn't be an afterthought!

One of the biggest struggles with creating multilingual apps is that the localization process is treated as an afterthought. For example, if the app is designed with an English UI, and a client needs you to customize it to suit another language, you'll need to go through the localization process in retrospect.

This can be much harder because you'll need to rework the design process, mock-ups and prototypes to take a new audience and language into consideration. It's not impossible, but it'll definitely take more effort. If you follow these best practices, we hope you'll be able to build multilingual apps for your clients that they love, and that their users genuinely want to use.

1. Do your audience research

If you're wondering how to do user research, you're already asking the right questions! Conducting user research involves understanding your potential app users' needs, interests, and culture.

Read about customs, cultural taboos, preferences, and humor. Do some research on phrases, humor, and instructions for mobile apps. Check out popular apps for that audience and see what they have in common. If it's possible, schedule an interview with a few potential app users and ask them how they use mobile apps, what features they like, and what aspects of the app to pay extra attention to!

Magic Start, Adalo's AI feature, can help accelerate this process by generating complete app foundations from a simple description. Tell it you need a booking app for a specific market, and it creates your database structure, screens, and user flows automatically—what used to take days of planning happens in minutes. This gives you more time to focus on the cultural nuances that matter most to your target audience.

2. Keep it short and simple

Building an app in a different language isn't easy. You don't have to aim to be a native speaker if you're figuring out how to write UX copy! Your target audience will find it easier to understand your app if you keep the language simple. If you're using translation software, it'll be much easier to use short phrases.

If you're using slang, cultural references or puns, make sure you run it by a native speaker. The rule of thumb is that the more you simplify, the easier your content is to translate and localize. This principle becomes especially important when you're managing multilingual content across web and native mobile apps from a single codebase.

3. Pay attention to the visuals

A big part of mobile apps is dependent on the visuals. Different cultures can interpret illustrations, icons, colors, and pictures in different ways. As far as you can, select visual elements that don't have ambiguous meanings! When choosing colors for your mobile app, keep in mind that cultural context will impact how your app is perceived.

For example, the 'cart' icon is often used for ecommerce apps in the US, however in Asia, users typically find the 'shopping bag' icon easier to comprehend. If you're including images of people, try and make them relatable and local. Lifestyle images, landmarks, and product shots need to be localized to ensure that your app is relevant to its audience.

With Adalo's visual builder—described as "as easy as PowerPoint"—you can display up to 400 screens at once on a single canvas, making it easier to review visual consistency across your entire localized app. This bird's-eye view helps catch cultural inconsistencies before they reach your users.

4. Be consistent

Commit to sticking to the same phrases for UX copy as you go through the app. Meaning that if you're using the word 'Next' on a navigation button, don't use 'Proceed' somewhere else. Pay attention to consistency as far as colors, phrasing, and instructions go, which will make your user experience a lot more seamless and efficient.

Magic Add, another AI feature in the platform, lets you add features from natural language requests. This helps maintain consistency because you can describe what you want in plain terms, and the system generates components that match your existing design patterns.

5. Save space for translated text

Translated text may not always take up the same amount of space as you expect. A popular example is the German phrase for 'Add to cart', which is translated to 'in den Warenkorb legen'—twice as long as the English version!

Many Asian languages, on the other hand, may have shorter phrasing than English, and can be more complex as far as typography goes, which means they'll need larger fonts. To minimize the confusion, leave some extra space to handle translated text without trading off the visual design.

When building multilingual apps that need to store extensive content across multiple languages, having no data caps on paid plans becomes crucial. You won't need to worry about hitting storage limits as you add translated content, user-generated content in multiple languages, or localized media assets.

6. Test your localized app at every stage!

Before you pat yourself on the back for a job well done (which you should definitely do!), make sure you test your prototype out as much as you can. Have potential users review your mockups, see how they interact with your designs, and gather as much feedback as you possibly can!

X-Ray, Adalo's performance analysis tool, identifies potential issues before they affect users. This is particularly valuable for multilingual apps where different character sets and text lengths can sometimes create unexpected layout problems. Catching these issues early saves significant rework later.

Get insights from Adalo Experts

Well-designed multilingual apps allow you to reach a larger audience, and potentially work with more clients. This can be an important step to unlocking new business opportunities and creating a more diverse portfolio of work for your mobile app development agency.

Adalo is a no-code app builder for database-driven web apps and native iOS and Android apps—one version across all three platforms, published to the Apple App Store and Google Play. Its modular infrastructure scales to serve apps with millions of monthly active users, with no upper ceiling. This matters for multilingual apps targeting global audiences—as your user base grows across different regions, the platform maintains performance at scale. Unlike web wrappers that can hit speed constraints under load, Adalo's purpose-built architecture compiles to true native iOS and Android code.

With over 3 million apps created on the platform, Adalo handles the complex App Store submission process so you can focus on localization rather than wrestling with certificates, provisioning profiles, and store guidelines. The Adalo App Academy has incredible free resources to help you set up, launch, and grow your business. Learn more about scaling your mobile app development agency, how to manage time, productivity hacks, and so much more!

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