Changing Locale within the app itself

Question

My users can change the Locale within the app (they may want to keep their phone settings in English but read the content of my app in French, Dutch or any other language ..

Answer 1

In Android M the top solution won't work. I've written a helper class to fix that which you should call from your Application class and all Activities (I would suggest creating a BaseActivity and then make all the Activities inherit from it.

Note: This will also support properly RTL layout direction.

Helper class:

public class LocaleUtils {

    private static Locale sLocale;

    public static void setLocale(Locale locale) {
        sLocale = locale;
        if(sLocale != null) {
            Locale.setDefault(sLocale);
        }
    }

    public static void updateConfig(ContextThemeWrapper wrapper) {
        if(sLocale != null && Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.JELLY_BEAN_MR1) {
            Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
            configuration.setLocale(sLocale);
            wrapper.applyOverrideConfiguration(configuration);
        }
    }

    public static void updateConfig(Application app, Configuration configuration) {
        if (sLocale != null && Build.VERSION.SDK_INT < Build.VERSION_CODES.JELLY_BEAN_MR1) {
            //Wrapping the configuration to avoid Activity endless loop
            Configuration config = new Configuration(configuration);
            // We must use the now-deprecated config.locale and res.updateConfiguration here,
            // because the replacements aren't available till API level 24 and 17 respectively.
            config.locale = sLocale;
            Resources res = app.getBaseContext().getResources();
            res.updateConfiguration(config, res.getDisplayMetrics());
        }
    }
}

Application:

public class App extends Application {
    public void onCreate(){
        super.onCreate();

        LocaleUtils.setLocale(new Locale("iw"));
        LocaleUtils.updateConfig(this, getBaseContext().getResources().getConfiguration());
    }

    @Override
    public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
        super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
        LocaleUtils.updateConfig(this, newConfig);
    }
}

BaseActivity:

public class BaseActivity extends Activity {
    public BaseActivity() {
        LocaleUtils.updateConfig(this);
    }
}