Site Settings: Missing options in Site language list

[SiobhyB]

Expected behavior

It's expected that the language options shown under My Site → Site Settings in the app would match the language options shown when navigating to Settings → General in Calypso.

Note, the language options under Site Settings are currently only available to WordPress.com users within the app. More details on the distinction between the two available language settings for WordPress.com users (site vs. interface) can be found here: https://wordpress.com/support/language-settings

Actual behavior

The number of languages available under Site Settings is limited and does not match up with those available while logged into the web. This means that users are confined somewhat when setting up a site, even though their theme may be translated into a number of different languages.

Internal reference: p4a5px-2NN-p2

Steps to reproduce the behavior

• Navigate to My Site → Site Settings within the app. Note, you'll need to use a WordPress.com site.
• Select the Language setting to open the list of available languages.
• Notice that the list seems somewhat limited, especially if compared to what's available while logged into the web.

Tested on Pixel 6, Android 12, WPAndroid 19.5

[SiobhyB]

Here's what I've been able to find from an initial exploration into this:

• A static list of languages is fetched for display under Site Settings, this is pulled in via the generateLanguageMap() function in the LocaleManager.
• The static list is manually maintained and is the list of languages that the app can be translated into (i.e. the list available via Me → App Settings → Interface Language).
• This isn't an issue in iOS, because iOS process a larger number of languages here via this JSON file, which also appears to be manually maintained.
• I'm not seeing a way to fetch this data via the API, so am thinking this may be a case of also adding a similar JSON file to Android and fetching the languages from that.

[SiobhyB]

As an update, I don't see a way to fetch this information via an API. Both Calypso and iOS seem to maintain a list manually.

A straightforward way to resolve this would be to update the list here. This wouldn't impact the list of languages displayed under App Settings, only under Site Settings, which is what we want.

The problem, however, is that we'd be looking to add ~100 languages to the list, which would be unwieldy to scroll through with the current UI. I've reopened a PR that introduces a more user-friendly locale picker, including a search option, here: #16331

If that improved UI is approved, we could then look to re-use it under Site Settings and add the missing languages.

[SiobhyB]

I've gone ahead to remove my assignment, as I'm no longer on groundskeeping and won't have time to dedicate to this in the immediate future.

The improved locale picker at #16331 is on track to be merged. For whoever picks this up next: My thinking was that that new picker could be re-used under Site Settings and the list of languages could be manually updated with all the options. For the list of languages, this list that's used in the iOS app seems the best option for re-use.