Why there is no offline mode

The Better Translate team · 10 September 2026

This is the feature request we get before the app has even shipped, and the answer is no. Here is why, and what actually to do about it.

Half of it already works offline

Speech becomes text on your phone, with no connection and nothing uploaded. Reading a photographed menu also happens on your phone. Both of those are on-device today, and they are the half people assume needs a server.

What needs a connection is the translation itself. The text goes to a server, gets translated, and comes back.

Why not put the translator on the phone too

Because the quality gap is still real, and this app translates the kind of sentence where the gap hurts. A compact on-device model is much better than it used to be at short, common phrases. It is much worse at a handwritten izakaya board with damaged characters, an ingredient that is a regional shortening, or a sentence whose meaning turns on a negation. Those are exactly the cases this app exists for.

Shipping a worse translator that works on a plane would make the app feel better and be worse at the moment it matters, which is standing in front of a person waiting for an answer.

What to do instead

• Get a local SIM or an eSIM. This is the real answer for travel, and it fixes maps and transit at the same time. Translation is a tiny amount of data: it is text going out and text coming back, not audio and not photographs.
• Photograph the menu now, translate it later. The image is read on your device, so you can capture with no signal and get the translation the moment you have one.
• If you genuinely need translation at 38,000 feet, an app with downloaded language packs will do it, at the quality a compact offline model manages. That is a real trade, and it is not the one this app makes.

What would change our mind

An on-device model that handles damaged text and negation as well as a server does. We run a benchmark against real photographed menus every time we change the pipeline, and if a local model clears that bar we will ship it. It has not yet.