Listo started in Romanian and English because that is what my family speaks. Then a review arrived in Greek. Then a support mail in Finnish, written in careful English, asking whether the app would ever come in "our language". I had been putting languages off one at a time, as if each were a project. In the latest update I stopped putting them off and shipped twelve at once. Listo now speaks 22 languages.
The new ones are Greek, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Turkish and Polish, joining English, Romanian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Chinese. Pick yours in Settings → Language; the app switches on the spot, no restart.
What "the whole app" means
- Every screen, from the list view to the receipt review to the analytics page — about a thousand strings per language.
- The tutorial and the coach marks on first launch, so a new user in Warsaw or Jakarta is guided in their own words.
- Notifications: when your partner ticks off the milk, the push arrives in your language, not theirs and not mine.
- Voice input understands all 22. Say "add two litres of milk to the weekend list" in Hungarian and it lands on the Hungarian list. The speech recognition still runs entirely on your phone; the language pack downloads once and stays.
- The store listings and screenshots, so what you see before installing matches what you get after.
How one person ships twelve languages
Not by learning twelve languages. I built the translations with machine help, then spent the real time on the parts machines get wrong: the register (Listo says "you" like a friend, not a bank), plural rules that differ between "2 items" and "22 items" in Polish and Slovenian, and the grocery vocabulary itself. A word list that calls yoghurt by its dictionary name is useless if every shop in the country prints something else on the label. Then I tested each language on a phone, screen by screen, and fixed what wrapped, overflowed or read as a robot.
What did not change
Nothing about your data. Translations live inside the app; switching language sends nothing anywhere. Your lists, your prices, your saved recipes stay on your phone and on the devices you linked, exactly as before. And the export still hands everything back to you in a file, whatever language the app was in when you built it.
Try it
- Update Listo, open Settings and tap Language.
- Pick one of the 22. The app switches immediately, including the tutorial if you want to read it again.
- Share a list with someone who prefers another language: each phone shows the same list in its own words.
If your language is not on the list yet, tell me which one and I will put it in the queue. Twelve at once turned out to be possible; a thirteenth is not far.
— Andrei