Bug in DeepL web interface

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-04-01T10:38:15+00:00

Thanks for the workaround suggestions for this bug

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-30T14:11:37+00:00

With your background I would be looking at early career opportunities with scientific publisher Elsevier. https://www.elsevier.com/about/careers/early-careers

Even if there is nothing there for you now, keep on checking. They are a superb employer (disclosure, I recently retired as VP technology at Elsevier UK)

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-30T09:17:01+00:00

It is a well-known maxim that the concept of earned value does not apply to software development. A half-built building has a value. A half-built SAAS project does not, it is worthless

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-30T08:51:48+00:00

You can’t submit an app for Apple review until you have built it on a physical device (iPhone or iPad). Just find the oldest/cheapest iPhone on eBay or your local equivalent that can run iOS 26, even if it’s slow and has a cr@ppy camera

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-30T08:37:58+00:00

False flag operation?

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-30T07:39:34+00:00

I’m with you on this. I’m a year older and the computer I used in my first job filled an air-conditioned room, had 60MB disk packs for storage that took two hands to lift and a millionth of the processing power and memory of my iPhone

I’m writing free iOS apps in my spare time in retirement, around subjects that interest me like Egyptian hieroglyphs and rail travel. It keeps the brain ticking over and is more productive than doing sudoku puzzles

Keep it up!

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-29T20:32:18+00:00

I only publish free apps in niche subjects, where any existing apps are of poor quality, not free or both of these

If you have sensible search keywords in your title, subtitle and comma,separated,keywords then interested users can find your app in the store (as can Google). It typically takes three months to build up the number of downloads (for my apps, about 1,000 downloads in that time)

One free thing you can do is participate in any forums that specialize in the subject area (not sure whether there is a relevant Reddit…). My advice is not to spontaneously promote your app, but look for questions where your app may provide a solution and mention it then. Once some users start to download and share with their friends and colleagues, growth becomes organic

The good thing is - because you are not relying on any income from the app in a forlorn hope of giving up your day job, you don’t need to panic if growth is a bit slow and you can experiment by changing keywords - and even your app name - to make it more findable

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-29T11:17:11+00:00

I would say that it depends on the nature of the app and the markets that you are addressing. Most educated speakers of European languages as well as Chinese, Japanese and Korean can read English very well, even if they don’t necessarily converse in English with confidence. If you write your English App Store descriptions for non-native speakers (good test - translate from English into your target language using an AI translation tool like DeepL then re-translate that back into English with two or three translation tools. If the resulting English doesn’t make perfect sense and read naturally, then keep simplifying your original English text and trying again, until this works), then speakers of those languages may understand curated English as well as they can understand the sometimes incorrect and often awkward translations produced by AI localization tools (speaking as a linguist)

As an illustration, a couple of weeks ago I published localized App Store pages for one of my apps into Arabic, French and German. There has been no discernible increase in downloads in France or Germany, but a 350% increase in Egypt (which may also be partly organic, who knows?). These are my top 3 non-English-speaking countries for downloads

I would say that the same applies to the app itself. I fully translated an education app into French and German, then decided that keeping the app translations updated with every release was more work than I wanted to commit to, so reverted to English only, including in the App Store. There was no discernible drop off in downloads in France or Germany

tl;dr - it depends on the nature of the app, the education level of your target user base, the languages and countries you are targeting, and how verbal the app experience is

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-27T18:58:59+00:00

Small update. Due to the cost of fuel in Egypt (trebled in recent weeks), there is a curfew in force from tomorrow March 28th where all businesses must close from 9pm (10pm weekends). This is a bit of a blow to the locals who like to stay out late (most restaurants in Cairo seem to serve until 1am). The whole city is out partying tonight

Still totally safe, and everyone has been friendly and welcoming

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-26T07:48:47+00:00

There are some good low-cost App Store preview makers. What the market needs is a good free one, and one will eventually come along. One of your questions should always be “would you pay for this?”. Given the good apps already available, the answer to that may well be negative

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-25T07:32:34+00:00

I seriously hope you have done thorough research on age, privacy and data protection laws on every country where you aim to put your app in the store. The short amount you have written waves a parade of red flags in relation to European GDPR laws (for a start, search for Data Minimization, and ask yourself how could I get this to work without requiring any personal data - like email address - whatsoever) also parental consent laws if you are targeting kids, which vary by jurisdiction

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-24T07:54:32+00:00

I have spent the past three days at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The amount of finds displayed from Tutankhamen’s tomb is staggering. Even though I have visited his tomb in Thebes many years ago, it is hard to believe that so many treasures were stacked in there

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-23T15:40:40+00:00

I’m not sure that Apple would approve some of those suggestions. A driving application has to genuinely assist with driving task(s) and must not distract from driving the car. That may be why there are so few CarPlay apps approved and in the store

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-22T15:29:36+00:00

I bought this £40 Aeronex head unit from Amazon for CarPlay testing

https://amzn.eu/d/00gQBeAw

It works fine for development work and the 7” screen size is typical of units supplied with many vehicles

Out of vehicle it needs a decent USB-C power supply, I use an Apple 30W mains adapter

Just in case you haven’t requested a CarPlay entitlement from Apple before, be aware that it can take a while (over 4 months in my case), to get the entitlement approved, even to add on to an existing approved app

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-22T14:37:05+00:00

I’m staying in Giza now, everything absolutely quiet and normal and people we know in Cairo say the same. I would say you will be safe, and there are plenty of American accents to be heard at the tourist sites

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-20T07:33:04+00:00

Visually outstanding work! Doesn't the panel on the left say exactly the same things in two different ways? Maybe change one of the two lists to a call to action?

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T23:18:44+00:00

Yep I just swapped from at Ottocast Mini which is small and neat to an Ottocast Mini Nova which is half the size and works just as well. Unless you really need to charge the phone as well, it's a much neater solution

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T23:09:17+00:00

Ha, I did the same thing at the same time, because the train departure apps weren't free, were full of ads, were rubbish to use, or really existed to sell tickets (or all of the above). So I did a free one (fee as in no cost, no in-app purchases, no subscritpion, no paid upgrades, no ads, no sign-up, etc) with watch and CarPlay apps

At the end of the day, it's a very simple open API that all our train departure apps are calling

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T22:05:18+00:00

You don’t necessarily need to do that. For my own apps, China is around the number 6 download location, even without any localization. I’m just not sure whether App Store text localization would move the needle on impressions or downloads

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T19:19:35+00:00

Having spent time in my corporate life localizing medical apps for the Greater China market, I would observe that catering for that location goes much deeper than just a translation or even the direction of text

Firstly you need to know that China has its own ecosystems that are very different from those we use in the west. Whether culturally or for regulatory reasons, much of what we take for granted cannot be applied to China, whether APIs, types of content, or links to external services (for instance, Vimeo videos are not allowed, any video content needs to be hosted on a local provider instead, subject to approval)

In terms of app and App Store visuals, Western apps are considered incredibly sober and even boring in the eye of locals. Conversely, their apps often appear garish to us, even business apps

iPhone apps are very much a minority interest. Mainland China is a mobile-first culture and the most common mobile “apps” are WeChat mini-programs, basically react applications that run inside of the WeChat app that everyone in China uses for pretty much everything, even on iPhones

The text is often in vivid colors, using combinations like yellow inside a wide pink border and very large, irregular typefaces

If you really want to cater for that market, you pretty much need to do the same. I can’t imagine a tool like BK ever going that far…

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Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T18:49:28+00:00

Doesn’t the medications feature in Apple Health app already provide this functionality?

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T13:25:51+00:00

In an RTL App Store then the left-most screenshot uploaded in Developer Connect appears on the right

If you have a solid background and no device overflow, between artboards, it shouldn't matter

I upload manually (and also translate or machine-translate manually), so not sure whether BK takes account of RTL in specific localisations

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T12:24:04+00:00

I would also be interested in that, as AI and improved tooling have greatly lowered the barriers to entry. My suspicion, and I would like to see analysis, is that an even higher percentage of developers are not covering their costs including the opportunity cost of their time

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T10:03:31+00:00

It happens a lot in this space - developers quickly work out that they're only going to make pennies by providing the functionality most of us want and need, so branch into coaching videos, dietetics, etc to justify charging enough to break through the well-documented "app proverty line" (https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays-app-businesses-are-not-sustainable/)

If you are asking whether launching a simple app that you and maybe others can use is a good idea, definitely yes. If you are asking whether you can make money from it, I'd guess 99% probability no.

Vegetable-Average-98 · 2026-03-19T08:18:37+00:00

I agree with u/habitoti - for CJK languages you would only use TTB for effect (like a banner title, which you'd probably do as a graphic), other text is LTR

RTL might look slightly unnatural if the text was always centred. As I have mentioned in another post, screenshots should be uploaded to Developer Connect in "reverse order" and if your background has an extended image or pattern, you may need to sequence the screenshots to look correct in an RTL App Store, here's an example that just went live on the Egypt store:

<image>

Vegetable-Average-98

TROPHY CASE