Hi John,
there are indeed some corner cases. Take Switzerland as an example. There are people speaking German, Italian and French. Unlike on Mac OS X where you can set an order of preferred language, on iOS you can only choose one language and will end up in english or the apps default language (I am not sure) if the user's preferred language is not available. To be concrete: App is German and English, user has selected French as his preferred language and the fallback is English even though the user would rather have the app in German.
Therefore I did a custom language setting and localization in an app which will start up and take the OS's selected language per default and if the app does not support it asks the user for his choice. Doing localization by hand was easy using an NSDictionaries (how suitable - the name).
But for most cases it is probably not worth the trouble. My app was especially for international people in being in Switzerland.
Best regards
Nikolas
Am 2012-06-03 um 13:23 schrieb John Tall:
> Hello.
>
> We currently have an iOS app available in English. We have decided to
> localize it into other languages, but first we wanted to look into how
> other companies are doing it in order to determine what the best
> practices would be.
>
> When we looked at how Apple localizes their apps we found something
> which we think is very strange. The App Store and iTunes apps
> determine their language based on the location of the user. For
> example, a user in Germany will get the entire apps in German even if
> the rest of the phone is configured to run in English.
>
> Of course the app content will differ between different countries, for
> example not all apps are available in every country and so on. But we
> are puzzled on why the rest of the app such as navigation buttons and
> labels are localized this way.
>
> An obvious scenario when this breaks would be an English speaking
> American moving to Germany. It is possible that he or she don't want
> to learn German and therefore keep using the apps in English.
>
> We fail to see why this would be a good way to localize an app but
> since Apple is doing it we assume that there has to be a good reason
> for it. Is this something that developers should learn from and do in
> their own apps?
>
> John
>
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Schöne Grüße
Nikolas
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