A thing that bothers me with the T-Mobile’s G1, aka HTC Dream, is the lack of Arabic support. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem considering the fact that I’ve been using Arabic for a very long time on computers with several different Linux distributions. Furthermore, rumors came out that the Android OS update 1.5 (Cupcake) will have built-in support for Arabic including localization. This, unfortunately, did not happen. However, this is Android after all, and as is the tradition with Linux, “if it is not available, build it. If you can’t build it, wait for someone else to and use that.. ” or so it goes.

There is a good effort regarding getting Arabic to work Android. This is not completely easy though. First, you should have your phone rooted (another link to get root). Afterwards, you need to install fonts that allow you to see Arabic, this was harder before, but thanks to Aman Alshurafa, you are able to install the fonts using the regular “copy to your memory card, rename to update.zip, restart phone holding down home+power, press ALT-s to install update.zip”. This does not really give you total Arabic support but it is a step forward. I should mention that Ahmed Essam was the first to write the Arabic reshaper class, and Amr Gawish updated it and wrote the first Arabic SMS reader.

After this start, many other Arabic programs started to show up on Android. Abdullah Bahitham made  Arabic soft keyboard for Android 1.5 (Cupcake). He also made an Arabic Notepad. There are several other programs that you could find in the Android market.

Thank you everyone for the effort you put in so that the rest of us can actually use Android and enjoy it.

NOTE: There is a related post called Arabic on Android – Take 2 that is relevant.