Language barriers in mobile apps, games, and foreign media are a constant friction point. Traditional screen translation tools on Android usually force users to take manual screenshots, freeze the screen, jump between applications, or deal with rigid line-by-line OCR card overlays that block the view.
To solve this, I built ALST (AI Live Screen Translation) — an open-source, real-time Android screen translator that translates any screen content in-place and renders the translated text directly over the original screen coordinates without ever leaving your active app.
In this article, I'll walk through the system architecture, how I integrated Gemini 3.6 Flash for single-pass vision translation, and how to prevent memory leaks during continuous high-density screen capturing in Android 14+.
🏗️ High-Level System Architecture
ALST is built following Clean Architecture and MVVM/MVI design patterns. The codebase is strictly partitioned into single-responsibility modules:
