support Google Play upload tools: Fastlane and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher

[eighthave]

There are two major tools for managing the localized files for Google Play: Fastlane Supply and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher. F-Droid also supports the same file/dir structure. If Weblate would directly support those files, then there would be a clean, simple, automated way to translate Android apps using Weblate. Here's the ideal workflow:

1. Weblate pulls source from git
2. translators work in Weblate
3. translations get pulled into app's source directly where Fastlane or Triple-T expect them
4. F-Droid automatically uses those translations from git
5. those translations are directly published to Google Play via the respective tool (Fastlane Supply or Gradle)

Both Fastlane and Triple-T use plain text for the source and translation file format. title and short_description would be easy to support directly as plain text, changelog and full_description much less so:

• title: 30 char limit, one line, plain text
• short_description: 80 char limit, one line, plain text
• full_description: 4000 char limit, multiple lines, can contain basic HTML
• changelog: 500 char limit, multiple lines, plain text

But perhaps this setup is just too different from standard translation workflows that assume strings are in a single source file. I've also opened issues on those tools to get feedback there:

• Improve support for 3P translation tools Triple-T/gradle-play-publisher#227
• integrating with Continuous Translation tools like Weblate, Transifex, etc. fastlane/fastlane#9520

I really want to find a way to get this workflow working really smoothly. Translations are really important, and something that really should be as automated as possible.

[eighthave]

Here's one hard part of this whole setup: the hard character limits for full_description and changelog. So 4000 and 500 chars are pretty big blocks of text for a single translation string. But I haven't found a way to set a character limit for a group of strings, only for a single string.

[azachar]

Hello, is here any progress?

[nijel]

AFAIK nobody is working on this right now.

[eighthave]

I applied for a small grant to fund work on this, and related issues. Wish me luck :) I'll let you know.

[PanderMusubi]

Any luck with that grant proposal?

[eighthave]

yeah, I got a small grant to work on this, so I should be able to get
something done.

[eighthave]

And finally the grant is started! This is one of the tasks for the grant.

Also, I wanted to point out that Triple-T seems to be implementing an XLIFF-based solution, which would be ideal: Triple-T/gradle-play-publisher#227 I think we should help them with that goal where we can, since using XLIFF will provide lots of benefits.

@matrixcoffee