What, you might ask, is the significance of Chinese characters in a mobile app? The answer, dear readers, is plenty.
You see, the one thing that a developer is always in need of, on a mobile app, is screen space. Due to small screen sizes, I'm always looking for creative ways to fit whatever functionality or information on that tiny screen. And where real estate is concerned, Chinese really saves the day.
Compactness
One Chinese character takes up one character space on screen. In fact, one Chinese character is one Chinese word! Therefore, text justification doesn't really apply to Chinese characters. Neither do word breaks.Consider the example below from A Tale of Two Cities.
Now the Chinese version (just a Google translation). You can probably see how compact the entire paragraph is - no spaces wasted.
Chinese characters
are compact.
The side effect of this is that we can cram a lot more information into one paragraph than we could with English... or any other language that uses the English alphabet. That's no small thing when you consider how much screen space there really is on your typical mobile app.
Conciseness
Remember I said the Chinese language was expressive? In the previous examples, I showed how a lot more words could be crammed into one space. Now, I'm going do the opposite - I will show you how much visual space a piece of information takes in different languages.Take the word "welcome".
In English, it takes 7 character spaces.
In Malay, it's worse. It takes 11 character spaces.
In Chinese? It takes 2 character spaces. Two!
Imagine if so much information could be represented in that little amount of horizontal spacing, how much space a mobile app developer could save by using Chinese, and how much more space there would be to play with.