Android 13 is developing the Panlingual feature: it can be single

According to reliable sources, Google is developing a new feature for Android 13 code-named "Panlingual", which will allow customers to apply language settings on a per-app basis, separate from system-wide settings. For example, a person who speaks multiple languages can set social media apps to Spanish while keeping their system user interface and other apps in the default English settings.

The development of this new feature may still be in its early stages, but tech media Android Police knows how it might work. All of this is subject to change, and the current logic is a new Application Language setting that controls this feature in the existing Language and Input page in the settings, although it will also be accessed directly from the Application Information screen.

This may sound like a basic feature, but it's not something that the Android system can do on its own right now. Apps can provide their own internal language settings (such as Google Maps), but many apps simply follow the system settings and load default localized resources. For the few applications that offer personal language settings, these options often need to be looked for in the application's own settings menu – this is not universal.

This new system will work for any application that has a unified set of controls and should be easier to find, although it will depend directly on the application itself, and even other language localization options are built into it. So if an app can only work in English, the feature itself won't add much. However, Android 12 also adds a translation API, so it's possible that these features can be combined in a way that fully automatically translates an application's resources without requiring developers to localize for each language.

A handful of third-party enthusiast tools can provide similar functionality, but their setup is not entirely simple. Xposed's App Locale 2 and App Settings Reborn let you adjust localized language settings on a per-app basis, but they require the device to be rooted and install the Xposed framework. Local languages can also be configured via ADB, but this is not very simple. As with many of the best features of Android, it looks like Google is taking a little inspiration from the root and ROM crowds.