>Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS.

That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next on the menu" is contrived at best.

The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.

If that's the best argument, Apple is doing pretty well.

>>Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently.

> That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one

I've lived in similar households. In KDE one can change the language on the fly for any arbitrary application or the desktop manager.

The Russian-speaking girlfriend, the Hebrew-speaking children, and the Spanish-speaking regular can all use KDE comfortably. I was actually surprised when I had to use an English-language Windows machine and could not change the language on the fly.

It's not an outlier for me. Most people I know switch between English for work and international friends and the local language for mostly everything else.

I'm switching languages I type in every whatsapp conversation.

On an older Android version that doesn't track per chat language, I have to switch the keyboard every single time. Three languages. And I happen to know more.

I switch between languages all the time too. Mostly, I just type whichever language I want, and the keyboard figures out it’s one of the two I use frequently and doesn’t bother me. Failing that, there’s a button next to the dictation button to change languages if autocomplete is acting up (this whole post was written with the keyboard set to Portuguese with only one miscorrection thus far).

You don’t need to change the whole OS’s language to type in multiple languages!

You’re talking about switching the keyboard language, which is easy to do all the time. The parent is talking about changing the language of the entire phones UI, which seems like something you’d do significantly less frequently than changing the keyboard.

Actually, I'd do it frequently if I could, since I live in a multi-lingual household.

> The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.

The vast majority of users in some countries may never change language, but there are other countries where multiple languages are officially spoken and where even members of the same household have different first languages.

For the phone form factor I would think that maybe language switching isn't as important since most people are not sharing their phones often, but for the iPad it might be more useful to be able to switch languages quickly.

The fact that the vast majority don't use a feature does not make it less important for the people who do. That's the same logic as saying, I don't know, that face recognition only has a false positive rate of 1/1000. If you scan a million people each day you still end up with 1000 people falsely identified.

I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)

FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:

- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.

- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.

Having a customisable control centre might be good. I often turn mobile data on and off (when I'm abroad), and it's a minor pain going into settings. On the other hand I hardly ever touch Bluetooth, and never use airdrop or airplay mirroring.

You can do this from Control Center.

3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control.

Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...

Personal Hotspot is not the same thing as mobile data...I suppose it's possible it's what the parent meant, but unless you meant to say that there was a switch to turn cellular data access for the phone itself on and off there, I don't think that's going to solve the stated problem.

There is an immediately visible cellular data switch (right next to airplane mode) in the control center, as well as a hotspot switch which is hidden behind the 3D Touch.

Mea culpa, you’re totally right about the distinction, I wasn’t reading clearly.

Interesting. Couldn't under ios10, but I've bitten the bullet and downgraded to ios12 and yes, it's right there, cool.

I had no idea widgets in the Control Center responded to 3D Touch/long press.

It is customisable, you know.

I'd like to use different languages for different applications. I'm using Russian and English languages interchangeably on my phone. Luckily many applications nowadays have separate language setting, but not all. That's not an outlier request. I hate that English-dominating CS monoculture that thinks that everyone is like them. It caused great headache of 8-bit encodings which the rest of the world had to deal with for decades, while US didn't even understand what the problem was about, strlen is just fine!

Yup. "ASCII is mostly OK if you're USian and only use English, therefore no problem exists."

It was good enough for UNIX... Heck, it was a big deal when early uucp and Internet links were finally 8-bit clean! (Only 7 bits are needed for plain old English ASCII, and when you were paying many thousands of dollars a month for a T1 (1.5Mbps) connection, using 7-bit was an instant 12% bandwidth boost...)

Which is why then you have to come up with tricks like typing c, instead of ç, eh instead of é and so forth.

Then everyone does it a bit differently and there is this pre-parsing phase trying to understand which idiom people have written the text.

Sure, but that's a historical quirk - epoch time has advanced from 0 a bit ;)

One thing I'd think could be useful would be switching the language based on Touch ID, so family members or partners who speak different languages could pick the device up and feel at home.

I would argue that Apple actively doesn't want to support your two use cases because they'd much rather sell a device to each member of your household and make it incredibly easy to share the page you are looking at between each member of the house.

This is what frustrates me about consumer electronics, that if you have a use case that the vendor doesn't want to support then you'll be constantly frustrated over what could be a simple software change.

>I would argue that Apple actively doesn't want to support your two use cases because they'd much rather sell a device to each member of your household and make it incredibly easy to share the page you are looking at between each member of the house.

Bingo! Apple have acquired immense expertise in applying this anti-pattern.

Language can be changed in the keyboard quickly and easily.