Write the store copy ahead of the release, and translate the app again

[andiwand]

The Android half of OpenDocument.ios#162. Same two problems, and one that repo did not have.

What was different here

The listing in this repository was behind the Play Console, not ahead of it. Play has been serving a full translation of the current English in all fifteen locales for some time; the copies checked in here were one or two generations older - six of them around 1700 characters against the console's 3500, Japanese and Chinese under 1000. Even the English had drifted by a line.

So skip_upload_metadata could not simply be turned off. Doing that would have pushed the old copies over fifteen locales of current translation. The first commit takes the live listing back into the repository unchanged, so the second one is a diff of what changes rather than of what was already true.

The store copy

scripts/store-copy.py v4.15.0 writes the "What's new" text for every locale before the release, instead of it being typed into the promotion box.

The English comes from the CHANGELOG.md section of that version, or from Unreleased while the heading is still open. Every other locale is translated by an agent of its own, given that locale's own description and the release before it, then read back by a second agent of the same language. Output is checked mechanically and a language that comes back wrong is retried, then named so it can be redone with --locales.

Play takes 500 characters where the App Store takes 4000, and that is the whole difference. 4.15.0's English was written at 497 and there is no translation of it that fits - German came back a fifth longer, French a quarter. The English is rewritten inside a 400-character budget, the check is hard at 500, and both prompts say so. The longest of the fifteen is French at 491.

scripts/store-listing.py owns the layout and stages what supply uploads. The release run checks before it builds, so a missing translation fails in seconds rather than after both bundles are up.

The app

No language had more than 44 of the 75 strings. German was missing 42 - the whole landing screen, every document action, all of the house ad, the unsaved-changes dialog, and OK and Cancel. Catalan had 15. Anything added after September 2023 was English everywhere, and that is most of what the app now shows.

Beyond the missing strings:

• thirty of the sixty-six values- directories held nothing but <resources></resources>
• Crowdin wrote values-de-rDE beside the older values-de and the two drifted, so which strings a user saw depended on their phone's region. All 43 Korean strings were in values-ko-rKR and values-ko was empty, so a Korean speaker outside Korea got an entirely English app.
• every translated locale carried a dead toast_error_generic
• crouton_remove_ads still offered to remove ads "via the menu" - it is a snackbar whose OK button makes the purchase, and there has been no menu since the options menu went

All nineteen languages are now complete, written by scripts/translate-app.py and each read back by a second agent of that language - over the whole file, not only the new strings, since a string translated three years ago beside one translated today is where the two stop agreeing on what "document" is called. Estonian and Swedish are translated for the first time, though the store has sold the app in both for years.

crowdin.yml is gone. Nothing came back from it after September 2023, and a source of translations that no longer delivers is worse than none: it says the gap is somebody else's to close.

The listing

Two things it claimed had stopped being true, in all fifteen languages: the app has had no file browser of its own since scoped storage, and ads have not been removable from a menu since there stopped being a menu. Each listing now also says plainly that a document is opened on the device and never uploaded - which is what the worst-rated review on the store says the app does, and it stopped being true of the app when the online loader went.

Title, and the two apps

fastlane/metadata/android is what both apps share; fastlane/metadata-pro and -lite hold the rest, read over it. Two things differ.

The title. Play has been serving OpenDocument Reader Pro in all fifteen storefronts already, and lite OpenDocument Reader - view ODT. The titles checked in here were never what Play showed, and eleven of the fifteen were 36 to 49 characters - written when the limit was 50 rather than today's 30, so supply would have refused every one of them.

Settled rather than guessed, and no longer translated:

	title
Pro	OpenDocument Reader Pro
Lite	OpenDocument Reader

OpenDocument is the format's own name and one name is one app people can pass to each other. Nothing is lost to search - Play indexes the title, the short description and the full description alike, so LibreOffice and the local words live in the short description, which has 80 characters for them. app_title in strings.xml is marked untranslatable for the same reason.

Advertising. Pro links no ad SDK and shows none, but every description said ads were shown, in all fifteen languages, on both apps. The shared description holds ${ads} and each app fills it in from its own ads.txt - lite has fifteen, pro has none, and a fill-in nobody answers leaves nothing behind, the space in front of it included.

The listing is uploaded now

The release uploads the listing with the bundle: title, both descriptions and that version's release notes, per app, in fifteen locales. listingPro / listingLite send it without a bundle, which is how a typo is fixed - Play refuses a version code twice, so repairing words should not need a version to carry them.

Graphics are not uploaded. The four screenshots checked in here predate the 4.14 redesign, and sending them would put the old ones back over the current.

The first run overwrites what the console says for those fields, on both apps, in all fifteen locales. That is the point - the copy is written here now - but it is worth knowing before the run rather than after.

Checked

• every values-*/strings.xml parses, holds all 75 keys in source order, none extra, apostrophes escaped
• spotlessCheck, assembleDebug (all three flavors), lintProDebug and testProDebugUnitTest pass
• every locale's release notes are four paragraphs, in the English's order, under Play's 500
• every staged title is within 30 characters, every short description within 80, every description within 4000
• both upload lanes run end to end locally as far as the credentials, each staging its own full listing for fifteen locales
• staged side by side, Pro and Lite differ in exactly two files per locale: title.txt, and one sentence of full_description.txt
• no ${...} survives staging, and no double space is left where one was filled in empty
• the recovered en-US description round-trips against what Play serves, byte for byte apart from the one line the console had edited

The Play Store call itself needs the repository secrets, so the first real release run is its own proof.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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