Amharic keyboard ranks #24 in UAE charts: the rank came from the category choice, and installs didn't keep up

A small developer with only two apps launched an Ethiopian text keyboard in September. It reached 21k installs in two months, and in Nov 6 it charted #24 on the UAE "Personalization" free chart. The ranking looks good, but its neighbors on the same chart gain hundreds of thousands a week, while it gains 4,700. This piece explains how its ranking came about, how crowded the "minor-language keyboard" business really is, and which language to pick and which few things to get right if you want to follow it.

A house cleaner in Riyadh who needs to message home

Saudi Arabia and the UAE employ large numbers of domestic and labour workers from Ethiopia. In 2023 the Ethiopian government also publicly said it would send 500k domestic workers to Saudi Arabia (Al Jazeera, 2023-04-17). They use Android phones to message family in Addis Ababa, and they write in Amharic, a language written in Ge'ez script (ሀ ለ ሐ መ……). The phone's built-in keyboard may not be convenient, so they search "Amharic Keyboard" on the Play Store.

Max Dev Tools' "Amharic Keyboard - አማርኛ ኪቦርድ" is one of the apps waiting in that search box. The first paragraph of its store page speaks directly to this group: "Write in your own language to family and friends, wherever you live."

Launched in Sep 2026 6, with 21,338 total installs by Nov 6 and +4,737 in the last 7 days (Google Play installs, 11-06). On the UAE Play "Personalization" free chart it ranked #144 in Oct 30 and climbed to #24 by Nov 6. On the same chart in Saudi Arabia it went from #163 in Oct 29 up to #31.

Why the rank looks better than the volume

The key is the category. Most other Amharic keyboards sit under Productivity. This one is in Personalization, where themes, wallpapers, and icon packs cluster.

Play's category charts measure install velocity within a single country, not global totals. In Nov 6, it ranked #18 to #36 on the UAE "Personalization" chart, while other apps gained between 40k and 570k globally in a week. A pink butterfly theme gained +426k in a week. This app gained +4,737. It got in because the people who install it are concentrated in the Gulf, and the local install velocity in the UAE and Saudi Arabia was enough. The top 30 bar on the "Personalization" chart in those two storefronts was never that high.

So don't read the rank as "it broke out." It's more accurate to read it as "it got exposure on a small chart nobody else was contesting, using very few installs." Charting does bring a bit more browsing traffic, and that is the one advantage it has over its peers.

Install curve (third-party estimates, AppstoreSpy): Sep 15 about 400, Oct 1 about 3,100, Oct 8 about 10k, Oct 14 about 15k. It then barely moved for two weeks, and only picked back up in early November to a few hundred to a thousand a day. The fast stretch was in early October, and the reason isn't visible from outside.

What it sells

A standard "keyboard shell": a full Ge'ez keyboard, one-tap switching between Amharic and English, plus a few things that keep users around: Amharic-English translation, an Ethiopian calendar (shows today's Ethiopian month and day, converted to the Gregorian calendar, with Ge'ez numerals), Amharic quotes, themes, and key styles. The store page specifically notes "the keyboard itself has no ads."

Money comes from two places: ads inside the app, and in-app purchases priced at $3.99 to $33.99. The store page says the purchase removes ads and unlocks premium themes. No one has disclosed the conversion rate.

The developer ships actively: roughly 9 releases in two months, going from version 1.3 to 2.9, and the package shrank from 45.7MB to 17.9MB (APKPure version history). But it has zero ratings. 20k+ installs with 0 ratings is rare in this category.

The developer, Max Dev Tools, has only this app and one photo recovery app under the name. The contact email is a personal Gmail, and the developer website sits on a public domain hosting an advertising disclosure file. Going by the name and this setup, it's most likely a solo developer from South Asia (inference).

Who it's competing with: this category is already crowded

Looking only at Amharic keyboards on Play (11-06):

There are also several with similar names: a Firehawk one at about 220k, Apps Villa, Skitcher One, Addiyon, and others (third-party stats pages, not verified one by one). Plus two free, big rivals: Gboard already supports Amharic, and a TikTok video teaching people to type Amharic with Gboard got 1.17M views. The iPhone also has a built-in Amharic keyboard, and TikTok creator @clickwithsami's "how to type Amharic on iPhone" video from last November got 150k views.

The most important row in the table is the second-to-last. Soft Droid launched 24 days later than this one, and in 5 weeks reached 75k installs, adding 10 times as many per week, and it has already built up 360 ratings averaging 5 stars. The difference: Soft Droid and Digital Apps club both lead with voice input (speak and get Amharic text), sit in Productivity to capture the main search terms, and built up ratings. This one has no voice input and no ratings.

Where users come from

• Store search, confirmed. Titles are written in English and in Amharic script, and descriptions are stuffed with "Ge'ez fidel," "Ethiopian calendar," and "translator." The store page is localized into 72 languages (APKPure). Every competitor is fighting over the same set of terms.
• Regional chart exposure from a category mismatch, confirmed. Covered above.
• Ethiopians in the Gulf: audience confirmed, reasons inferred. It only charts in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We can't see its rank or installs in Ethiopia itself, where the bulk of the market may be.
• Ads, not seen. Searching "amharic" in the Meta Ad Library turned up nothing for it, but a failed search doesn't mean no spend. Common practice for these shells is AdMob monetization with a small amount of Google app ads to recover costs. Not verified.
• TikTok, no direct mention found. Searching "amharic keyboard" turns up tutorials from Ethiopian tech creators: @aye_technology_now's "best Amharic keyboard" video got 500k views, @ziz_tech's "stop switching keyboards, type in English letters and it comes out as Amharic" got 380k views (7 ), and @clickwithsami's video from last July, "100% of people type Amharic by voice," got 68k views. On TikTok, users are asking for two things: phonetic typing that doesn't require switching keyboards, and voice input. This app leads with neither.

What to copy, and what not to

What's worth copying is the play itself: one keyboard codebase, swap in a different language pack, write the title in the community's own script, localize the description into dozens of languages, and target people living abroad who use Android and need to talk to family in their mother tongue. The Gulf, Europe, North America, and South Asia all have diaspora communities like this, and keyboards get used every day once installed, so there are plenty of ad impression opportunities.

What's not worth copying is the outcome. Within Amharic alone, at least 3 similar shells entered in 2026 (June, early September, late September). The best one reached 400k in 5 months, the fastest reached 75k in 5 weeks, and the slow one is this app. The barrier is low, so anyone can enter. What separates the winners from the rest isn't the feature list. It's three things: voice input, ratings (Soft Droid got 5 ratings averaging 360 stars in 5 weeks, possibly through rating prompts), and ranking for the main search terms.

If it were you

One-line verdict: this is a good example of a play to learn from, not an opportunity to copy as-is. Amharic is already crowded, and this app is itself a copycat that didn't break out.

Who it suits: small teams that already have a keyboard codebase, know ASO, and earn from AdMob, and want to spread across several languages for very little cost.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who needs one app to carry them as a standalone business, and anyone unwilling to touch store tactics like rating prompts or category switching for chart positions.

How to do it: Skip Amharic. First search Play for the next batch of languages: Tigrinya, Afaan Oromo, Somali, Pashto, Nepali. For each, count how many leaders there are, how many new entrants came in over the past year, and whether anyone offers voice input. Pick the one with the weakest leader and the fewest new entrants. Build voice input and phonetic typing (type Latin letters to get the native script) into v1, since that's what users on TikTok are actually asking for. Start collecting ratings from week one.

How to get users: store search is the main channel, with titles written in both languages. Pick the category where no same-language competitor has a foothold, and target the diaspora-heavy regional charts (UAE and Saudi Arabia are low-barrier) to gain exposure. Then work with a tech creator in that language to make a tutorial video. Tutorials from creators like these often reach hundreds of thousands of views.

Timing: there's no clear window. This business isn't driven by events. It's driven by who claims the main search terms and ratings for a given language first. The later you enter, the more same-language shells there are.

Signs you've read this wrong: if this app breaks out of the small Gulf charts over the next month or two, reaches tens of thousands of global weekly installs, and its ratings climb, then the "Personalization" route works better than it looks, and the category choice is worth treating as a core tactic. If the language you pick gets under a few thousand installs in its first month, either that diaspora group is too small or Gboard is already good enough. Move on to the next language.