Stray zero-width spaces in Android app translations mostly enter via repositories, not Weblate

A census of F-Droid app translations found that Weblate-hosted apps contain about a quarter as many stray zero-width spaces as other apps. Tracing 90 such characters in 23 Weblate apps showed none were added by a Weblate commit, with most arriving alongside new strings or languages. Sources included translation commits, syncs from Localazy, Crowdin and Transifex, and code copied from other projects. A control check confirmed the detection method could catch Weblate-saved characters, and the authors report that predictions about six languages where the character is legitimately used largely failed. The authors publish these results as negative findings and suggest flagging the 'space plus two zero-width spaces' pattern, while noting the evidence is thin in those languages.