I translated my Shopify app into 20 languages and these are the results

I translated my app three months ago into the 20 languages that Shopify had app listings for. Not all the languages had a real effect, but some were definitely worth it.

Here's the data (installs by country since I don't have direct locale data):

Top languages (installs from prev period to current period):

• Germany: 31 to 50
• Italy: 21 to 29
• Brazil (Portuguese): 10 to 29
• France: 18 to 28
• Spain: 11 to 14
• Japan: 2 to 7

Effect on total installs: For the period before adding the translations, those six countries made up 5.6% of my app's total installs. For the period after, they made up 9.46%

(I measured this on share of new installs for the period because that metric mostly removes the app's overall growth as a significant variable)

Note: Other languages didn't seem to have a significant effect: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Polish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish

Was it worth it?

I put off translating my app for a while because I thought it would cause a permanent headache for developing the app in the future. But I decided if I could find a way to add translations without adding significant permanent overhead, it could be worth it.

After seeing the numbers, the change was pretty incremental. However, it only took me about two days to translate the app so it may have been worth it.

I think translating the app would have taken much longer than two days if I was using the traditional translation method. You can read about it here: How to automate translation for a React app. The TL;DR for that article is basically:

• Write normal English in tr("...").
• Run a script → it collects missing strings into toTranslate.json.
• Paste into AI → get translations.
• Run merge script → done.