Sunday, March 20, 2011

Dear #Google, how about supporting #India on the #Android?

#Reading #Wikipedia in one of the languages of India is one of the things we really want you to support. As you can see from our statistics, there is ample room for improvement. As the force behind the Android phones, it would be cool when the rendering of Indian languages gets your attention.

Recently the Android 2.2 client for looking up meaning of words using the Silpa dictionary service was launched. For now it supports only the English-Malayalam and English-Hindi dictionaries. You can read the meanings in Malayalam or Hindi even though Android 2.2 doesn’t support the rendering of its characters.

Given that Android does use Unicode fonts as its underlying technology, it should not be difficult to add fonts for the languages of India. It is not as if the Android phones are not capable enough.


Google, my promise to you: when Android supports the languages of India, I will make a lot of noise to get people to adopt this. I will also post a blog post three months after this functionality becomes available. I expect that the numbers will be quite different from the ones you can see above.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2 comments:

Merhawie said...

Great chart find! I am a bit curious as to why Google and the rest of the community hasn't added support for such a large community yet. More relevant for me I am curious as to when they will add support for the Ge'ez script.

Defender said...

its the same with us nepali users of android phones... not able to view the devnagari scripts/characters... hope google and the android developers look at it ...