International Limitations on Apple Services ⇥ andrewmarinov.com

Andrew Marinov:

It’s been years since I’ve started filing radars and hoping that Apple would add my native Bulgarian language to iOS and with each new release, the release notes are the first thing I pour through, looking for any new language editions.

Unfortunately, though, not only is Apple seriously behind on language support, with each year new features come that are geolocked and exclusive.

With each release more and more functionality is being showcased in keynotes that’s out of the reach of a big part of the world.

In this post I’ll go through a couple of major features and see how iOS compares to Android in regard to localization.

I sort of understand why Siri doesn’t support as many languages or features internationally — the complexity of different syntaxes combined with international availability of other services makes it difficult, or even impossible, to achieve total feature consistency worldwide.

But the continued restriction of apps like News to just the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia baffles me. These three countries are officially English-only, but I don’t see how that affects an app that basically aggregates articles from local and international news sources. The recommendation engine is the only hangup that I can see, but even that is ostensibly powered by Siri, which is available in far more countries.

See Also: The international availability of Apple’s entertainment services from MacStories, last updated in 2014.