Atomic Fast Now Speaks 10 More Languages

Atomic Fast 1.3.0 is out, and the app now runs in eleven languages instead of one:

Dansk · Deutsch · English · Español · Français · Italiano · Nederlands · Norsk bokmål · Português (Brasil) · Русский · Svenska

Same release on iOS and Android. Nothing here is a beta or a flag you have to find.

The whole app, not only the main screens

A fasting app is mostly numbers and short labels, which makes it easy to translate the settings screen and quietly leave English everywhere a person actually looks. So the work covered the surfaces you see mid-fast: the timer ring, the metabolic phase you're moving through, the widget on your home screen, the Live Activity on your Lock Screen, the Apple Watch app, and the notifications that tell you a phase has started.

That's about 1,900 strings per language in the iOS app, with separate sets for the widgets and the Watch, and roughly 1,990 strings plus 81 plurals per language on Android. Plurals carry more weight than they sound like they do — Russian sorts them into four categories where English gets by with two, and a plural rule that's merely close reads as broken to the person using it.

Your device language, or one you pick

By default the app follows your phone. If you'd rather read it in something else, Settings → Language lists every language the app ships, each written in its own name, plus a System option. Your choice applies right away — text, dates, numbers and units.

One honest limit: on iOS your widgets, Live Activity and Apple Watch follow your device language, not the in-app picker. They're fully translated; they just run as separate processes that take their language from iOS. Android widgets do follow the in-app choice on Android 13 and later. If you want everything in one language on an iPhone, set it at the system level.

Why all ten shipped at once

The tempting plan is to add a language, ship it, add another, ship again. We did the opposite, because every language we added kept finding problems in the ones already finished. A Dutch translator would hit a sentence the app assembles from two halves, and that same sentence turned out to be broken in French and Portuguese too. Ten languages arriving together meant one release, not ten rounds of fixes for people who'd already updated.

Adding languages also cost us something we'd rather not spend: download size. An Android App Bundle normally ships only the languages matching your phone, which would have made the in-app picker a trap — pick Deutsch on an English phone and the interface stays English, silently, because Google Play never delivered those files. We turned that optimization off. The picker works everywhere, and the download is a little larger than it would otherwise be. For an app we've worked hard to keep small, that was a real trade, and we'd make it again.

What the automated checks couldn't see

We built eight checks that run on every language: coverage, plural categories, placeholder integrity, cross-platform parity. All eight were green while the most prominent number in the app — the countdown in the middle of the timer ring — still read 44h 17m on a Russian phone.

The cause was subtle. The translations existed in all ten languages. But the code passed a whole number where the translated text expected a piece of text, which produced a lookup key that lived in no language file at all, so every language quietly fell through to English. No check caught it, because from the outside nothing was missing.

We found it by opening the app in Russian and reading it. That pass also turned up a "Free" badge that overflowed its circle in Russian, and a goal card that truncated far enough to hide the time your fast ends. Then native speakers went through every language line by line and sent back 1,537 corrections.

The lesson we're keeping: automated checks stop the mistakes you've already made. Reading the running app in a language you don't speak is what finds the rest.

What's not in this release

Japanese, Korean and Chinese aren't here. They need human translation rather than a drafted-then-reviewed pipeline, and their hard part is typography — line breaking, font fallback, text that changes shape at small sizes. Rushing them would risk the ten languages that just landed, so they're their own wave.

The store listings are also still English in most markets while we work through them. A fully translated app next to an English store page is a normal in-between state, not an oversight.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to change a setting to get my language? No. Update the app and it follows your phone. If your phone is set to a language Atomic Fast doesn't ship yet, you'll stay on English.

Can I use the app in a language my phone isn't set to? Yes — Settings → Language. On iOS that changes the app; widgets, Live Activity and the Watch app follow your device language instead. On Android 13 and later, widgets follow your in-app choice too.

Were these machine-translated? They started as drafts and were then reviewed by native speakers of each language, who returned 1,537 corrections across the ten. Anything you still find wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.

Does switching languages affect my fasting history or meals? No. Your data doesn't move. Only the text around it changes.

Is Japanese, Korean or Chinese coming? They're planned as a separate release rather than part of this one. We don't have a date to promise yet.

Atomic Fast is free on the App Store and Google Play.

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