Yes, absolutely, we use apps every day, it's an important area. If you think about young people in particular, my kids are on their phone before they've got out of bed in the morning, and a lot of their digital life isn't on a PC or on a laptop, it's on their phone. That's where their digital life is largely happening. And, by coincidence, at the same time as Siân was doing her PhD, I did a little study looking at apps on the App Store and found very similar sorts of patterns in terms of what sorts of apps are available in Welsh or Welsh bilingually. Forty three per cent of them were either teaching Welsh, or teaching something through the medium of Welsh—teaching counting, teaching colours and so on—and obviously there's a bit of fuzz between those two. Ten per cent were travel, 9 per cent were games. Okay. So, there are apps out there.
It's difficult to know how popular they are, and, in many ways, things like the App Store, the Google Play store work against Welsh language apps being found. So, a lot of the ranking, a lot of the ways that the store decides to put an app in front of you is by popularity. So, if you've got an English language app and a Welsh language app, even if everybody in Wales loved the Welsh language app, the chances are the English one is going to be more popular. So, they tend to get buried, they're not easy to find, they're not easy to search for.
Things like language metadata—so, the description of what language this app is available in—are, or were certainly, on the App Store, a total mess. You'd have some apps that featured Welsh that didn't include Welsh in their description and some apps that included all sorts of other languages, but not Welsh, when Welsh was a language that was provided. It's a very difficult space, I think, to actually find the apps, and that's why things like this app directory that I spoke about earlier are such a useful resource, because, effectively, they filter out all the apps that don't have the Welsh language and you can just concentrate on the ones that are there.
Coming back to a point earlier, when we were talking about what we do with large tech companies, as part of my study, I did a small questionnaire with developers, and one of those developers was not based in Wales, not based in the UK—I think, as I recall, they were based in America. They said, basically, 'The way our app is set up is that we can plug any language into it, and what we like to do is work with different language communities.' So, I think they'd worked with the Irish language, they'd given the English language materials to them, and then volunteers, a little group of whoever they were, did a translation, gave it back to the company, who then included the Irish language in their app. So, again, if we can get these app developers not to be saying, 'I'm going to produce an English language version, a Spanish-language version and a French language version', but to say, 'What I'm going to do is I'm going to produce one version that can support multiple languages'—and there are proper technical challenges in that—then we've got the opportunity to say, 'Well, okay, we'd like Welsh to be one of those languages you are offering.' 'Here it is, it's ready to go, maybe you need a couple of little extra things from us, let us know, we can do those and now this app is available.' So, I think there are definite possibilities there.