Languages of app titles is not always English

While testing !48 (merged) I uploaded an apk and found out that Repomaker uses the wrong language by default. I uploaded an apk of my app HW-Manager which is translated into several languages. I excepted to see English which is the default language of my system/browser but instead saw Farsi (language code fa).

This is the apk I used: HA-Manager_0.94.3.apk

changed milestone to %1.0

This is what an aapt dump badging HA-Manager_0.94.3.apk results in:

package: name='de.nico.ha_manager' versionCode='26' versionName='0.94.3' platformBuildVersionName='6.0-2704002'
install-location:'auto'
sdkVersion:'4'
targetSdkVersion:'22'
uses-permission: name='android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE'
uses-permission: name='android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE'
application-label-ar:'اتش دبلیو-منیجر'
application-label-cs:'HW-Manager'
application-label-de:'HA-Manager'
application-label-en:'HW-Manager'
application-label-es:'HW-Manager'
application-label-fa:'ای دبلیو-منیجر'
application-label-fr:'HW-Manager'
application-label-hu:'HW-Manager'
application-label-ja:'宿題マネージャー'
application-label-pl:'HW-Manager'
application-label-pt-BR:'HW-Manager'
application-label-tr:'HW-Manager'
application-icon-160:'res/drawable-mdpi-v4/ic_launcher.png'
application-icon-240:'res/drawable-hdpi-v4/ic_launcher.png'
application-icon-320:'res/drawable-xhdpi-v4/ic_launcher.png'
application-icon-480:'res/drawable-xxhdpi-v4/ic_launcher.png'
application: label='اتش دبلیو-منیجر' icon='res/drawable-mdpi-v4/ic_launcher.png'
launchable-activity: name='de.nico.ha_manager.activities.Main'  label='HW-Manager' icon=''

fdroidserver is extracting application: label which normally holds the main name of the app. So I would say it is the designed behavior and the problem is actually with the uploaded APK.

I tested it with a notes app and it was working as excepted, English text.

Then I was testing it with a barcode scanner app and was faced with Farsi again.

To conclude I think this is a bug in Android where normally the English title gets used for the general label but when a Farsi translation is available, this gets used.

As a quick fix I suggest using application-label-en when it's available and only falling back to application: label= when not. For the long term I suggest to make app titles translatable too as there are apps where this makes sense (my HW-Manager for example which is called HA-Manager in German or apps with more generic titles like "Notes" which gets translated to "Notizen" in German for example).

@grote Should I attach aapt dumps for the two apps?

So this is an aapt bug and as such needs to be worked around in fdroidserver. So I'd say either move this ticket there or create a new one and reference this one.

I'll go and create a new ticket in fdroidserver.

mentioned in issue fdroidserver#306

This is it: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/issues/306

added dev label

changed title from Wrong language used when uploading apk to Languages of app titles is not always English

changed the description

mentioned in issue #103 (closed)