Hi Translate Review
The chat-app translator
If your life runs on WhatsApp in two languages and your phone runs Android, this is the specialist tool. Everyone else should look elsewhere — starting with the fact that there's no real iPhone version.
Where Hi Translate shines
- Floating translator turns any chat app into a bilingual one
- Face-to-face, call, and meeting translation built in
- Defaults that fit its audience — English ↔ Hindi out of the box
- No sign-up walls or onboarding hoops in our test
- Not on iPhone — the App Store apps with this name are unrelated lookalikes
- The floating translator needs overlay and assistive access, i.e. permission to read your screen
- Face-to-face mode is voice-only; you can't type
Hi Translate is one of the biggest translation apps on Earth — over 500 million installs — and most iPhone-centric rankings have never heard of it. Its scale comes from South Asia and Africa, where it ships pre-installed on Tecno, Infinix and itel phones, and from doing one job extremely well: translating chat messages inside other apps.
The floating translator is the heart of it. A small bubble sits on your screen; tap it and the message you received in Hindi appears in English, or your English reply is translated before you send it. That requires deep permissions — drawing over other apps and assistive access that can read the screen — which is the category's honest trade-off: convenience for trust. In our hands-on test we captured the permission flow and left it un-granted.
Beyond chat it has face-to-face mode with the same flipped-screen design as Apple Translate (voice-only here), call translation, and a meeting mode. Our English → Hindi text test came back correct and natural. The app was also notably polite for its class: no sign-in wall, no paywall ambush, and the pair defaulted to English ↔ Hindi before we touched a thing. The dealbreaker for many readers is simple: there is no genuine iPhone version.
Version reviewed: 6.0.8 · July 30, 2026
Screenshots below were captured by our automated test rig on a real Android phone (Moto G Power 2021, Android 11) running the current Play Store build.
Built for chatting, not sightseeing
Open Hi Translate and the priorities are clear: Face to face, Call translation, and a 'Floating translator' that promises to translate your messages inside other apps. Notice the language pair it chose before we touched anything: English → Hindi. This app knows exactly who its half-billion users are — people texting across languages every day, most of them in South Asia and Africa, where it often comes pre-installed on Tecno and Infinix phones.
The Hindi test: correct and clean
'Where can I find the fish market?' came back as 'मैं मछली बाजार कहां पा सकता हूं?' — correct, natural Hindi. The result screen keeps it simple: big text, a speaker button for each language, copy and share. No dictionary extras, no example sentences — this is a messaging tool, not a study aid.
The flipped screen, again — and here it's voice-only
Hi Translate has the same trick as Apple's face-to-face mode: the top half flips upside down so the person across the table can read their side. Each half gets its own mic. The catch: there's no way to type here — it's speech only, so both people need to be comfortable talking to a phone.
The main event needs to watch your screen
The floating translator — the feature this app is famous for — translates chat messages inside WhatsApp and other apps with one tap. To do that, it asks for permission to draw over other apps and act as an assistive service, which means it can read what's on your screen. That's the honest trade of this whole app category: enormous convenience for a big helping of trust. We captured the permission screen and stopped there.
Is Hi Translate on iPhone?
No. The App Store apps named 'Hi Translate' are from unrelated developers. The real app, by the Transsion-linked developer Zaz, is Android-only.
Why does Hi Translate need accessibility permissions?
Its floating translator reads and translates messages inside other apps, which requires overlay and assistive-service access. That means it can see your screen — enable it only if you're comfortable with that trade.
vs Google Translate
vs DeepL
vs Naver Papago