osamasaadah

Dear friends...i need ur urgent help...i am just about to make a deal with a chinese company that produce tavlet pc with Android OS.... it's very important to me b4 making the deal to make sure that Android fully support Arabic language or not????!!!! thx alot.

Martimus

Welcome to the Android Forums!

Unfortunately Android does not natively support the Arabic language. This is a known issue and has been reported to Google by others.

Issue 5597 - android - Arabic language support . - Project Hosting on Google Code

If you star this issue you can add your support to the feature request. There is, however, some third party support for Arabic language. Check out the following paid app in the Android Market...

Arabic Android - ????? ??????? - Android app on AppBrain

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noreast

It is a shame that Android does not support RTL out of the box. I had an Android phone that did show Arabic text but to a native speaker it was layed out Left To Right (instead of right to left) and it showed disjoint letters (i.e did not select the proper glyph, or shape, for a given character based on its context). I had to return it and go for iPhone (for a different reason related to a WiFi glitch whose fix was not available on my carrier's tweaked ROM without rooting)

An iPhone 3G by comparison displayed the same Arabic website with proper text layout out of the box, no need to root (voiding your warranty) to install a 3rd party app. Arabic/Farsi/Urdu/Hebrew speakers did not have to vote for their languages to be supported, Apple just got it right out of the box.
Android is a great OS and it is always good to have a strong alternative to Apple.

Android may well be more a more sophisticated/versatile OS but you needs to be a hacker to get it right. And with all due respect to the great talent that participates on this forum, most of the users (i.e the rest of us) are either not technically inclined or not willing to be bother to have to root our phones to get functionality that we should expect to have out of the box. Yes you need to Jailbreak iOS to break free of iTunes/Carrier lock, but those who need to do so are a small portion of the user base and this is why I think Android has a tough battle to dislodge Apple form the throne of smartphones.

king_roach

Amen.