There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the autotranslation feature or people have naturally migrated away from it...
in general, I feel that tech, maybe due to being so overwhelmingly from the US, has very poor support for things like multilingualism, which is in fact more common than not across the world (the US being an outlier traditionally - and even there, I think the influence of Spanish is growing).
For example:
- On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one
- It's impossible on Android to have different apps use different languages (unless the app itself allows for it), which would not only fix the issue mentioned above with the badly translated apps, but also be really helpful e.g. for language learners
- It took Google Maps years to add a feature where, if you start typing a street name and it suggests a street, it gives you the option of directly filling in the street number too (e.g., I'm typing "Foob" and it suggests "Foobarstraße, 11111 Berlin", but giving me the option to directly type the street number before the comma). My hypothesis for why this took so long to add is that people from the US were totally oblivious to the need for this feature, since in the US, the street number comes before the street name and people could just type "123 Foob" and get the suggestion for the full address
- There is simply no way in the Play Store (and I believe in the App Store it's similar?) to see reviews in another language than the one from your store. This makes no sense for me, for many apps there are very few if any German reviews, but I'd still like to see English ones. I think it's even worse for app developers, although maybe they have some separate way of seeing that? Amazon doesn't have that problem btw.
- Also, a pet peeve of mine: using country flags for languages. Yeah, nope.
and so on ...
