I am developing a travel app which contains many POI-s for which different organisations are responsible. Some of these organisations publish the information about their POI-s only in English, while others do it in multiple languages.
My question is, what are the best practices for dealing with such content in an app now, that Apple prefers per-app localisation to be controlled only from the Settings app? (see here: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=u2cfuj88)
Let’s take a scenario in which a user uses his/her iPhone and our app in German. He browses through POI-s with German descriptions, with the app’s standard texts (OK, Back, etc.) also in German. So far so good.
He clicks on a POI which only has an English description. An alert appears in German, asking if he wants to open it, despite its description being in English. If I had a custom localization solution, it would be no problem to display the standard texts in this dialog also in English. With Apple’s new approach, however, I have a problem:
- I can either leave the app’s texts in German, which looks plain weird
- Or I can ask the user whether he would like to set his app to English via the settings app and redirect him there if yes.
The latter approach has multiple issues. Firstly, if you are constantly browsing some POI-s in German, some in English, this gets very cumbersome. Secondly, if he sets the app language to English for this one POI and does not set it back afterwards, he will either read the German POI-s with English app texts or even also get their content in English.
Is there a better way?
In its current form, I think Apple’s “new” move basically forces app developers to either have all content in all supported languages, or stick with English-only apps, which is the exact opposite of accessibility. It is great, of course, if a large museum sends us content in Chinese, but at the same time, we cannot force the small church next to the museum to pay for a Chinese translator.
As for implementing custom localization, I suppose Apple’s move means that sooner or later, apps using custom localization will be rejected. What are your thoughts?