Makes sense to whom? Not to someone who's been using a company's web site in one language, and then suddenly gets shifted to another language simply because they want to make a purchase from the same company they were communicating with seconds before.

Imaging talking to someone at your bank's call center, and then when you get transferred suddenly speaking to someone in another language. "Well, you wanted the Fraud Protection department. It makes sense to speak {$xx__language}."

Computers are supposed to work for people, not the other way around. We have grown accustomed to half-assery, using the excuse that "everyone else does it."

Just today I received a package from Amazon. A simple cat food bowl. I had to put it together. I remember when it was so unusual for production burdens to be shifted to the consumer that such products were labeled "some assembly required." Now we're so used to companies not completing their work, that we make excuses for them. Enough.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is an issue, but the issue is not they ignore user's language setting.

What it does is that

1) They detect store region based on user's region instead of language preference, which is reasonable IMHO;

2) However, they don't have English display language for their German store. This can and should be improved. For example, Amazon Japan offers Japanese, Chinese and English. Google can definitely do better since their products are much more limited and they have translations for most of content already.

>Imaging talking to someone at your bank's call center, and then when you get transferred suddenly speaking to someone in another language. "Well, you wanted the Fraud Protection department. It makes sense to speak {$xx__language}."

A better analogy would be you're in China. Well now everything will be in Chinese and Chinese only to begin with.

If your business units can't cooperate on something as simple as passing a language variable, then the business is broken.

And that's not what I said.

I said it's "reasonable" to switch to German store if you're in Germany (1), but they should still have a English display language for it if user prefers English (2). They failed at 2, not 1.

I do not speak flemish (be-nl). Yet, my page of the store is in flemish.

My browser (a Google browser!) is configured to ask for pages in english, and as a fallback, in french at a lower priority. There is a French version of the store, and it's still not sending it.

And a lot of people here in Belgium speak exclusively English. German is also an official language in the country, though only actively spoken in a small part of it. (Map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium)

I have no obvious way of changing the language, other than a flag which rather points to changing the region. Turns out, in the region picker (https://store.google.com/regionpicker), "Belgium French" is a region, separate from "Flemish". When I click "Belgium French", a warning appears. In Flemish.

In other words, almost everything about language that store page can get wrong, it does get wrong.

No, it will appear in two languages, top one being your current region/language, and bottom being your target region/language. So in your case, it should show in nl-BE and fr-BE.

Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ICwIgxH.png

If a retail store physically located in Germany can cope with my ignorance of the local language without ever meeting me before, then Google, with it's vast knowledge of me - and my specific choice of language preference - should be able to do the same.

In other words - there's absolutely no good reason why I can't use either the Google or Apple stores in the country I live in but using any language I choose.

Also - switching region to one that speaks a language I understand usually means I then can't select a delivery address in the region that I live in. It's like they refuse to sell things to people who don't understand the official language of the country.