Apple’s India engineers push iPhones closer to hinterlands with local languages
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: Last month, Apple announced that starting April, its iPhones will support 10 Indian languages.
Thanks to the expertise of its Indian teams working with global ones, support for local languages will not just help Apple catch up with what Google’s Android has offered in India for years—it will also help it capture more first-time phone buyers from non-metropolitan markets across the country, experts said. From next month, iPhones eligible to receive Apple’s iOS 18.4 update will support Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
These languages would be applicable across every nook and cranny of the iPhone’s software interface, just the way it already supports languages such as French, Latin or Mandarin Chinese. A senior company executive told Mint that the introduction of the new languages involved “crucial contributions from Apple’s India teams, which work cross-functionally across various aspects of the company’s software development, with their global counterparts." “The language support is integrated closely into the Apple interface, and is not just a translation layer.
This ensures consistency and the use of colloquial local language terms for various words, such as phrases used in the alarm clock app, or the weather app. All third-party developers will also be able to integrate the system language support to make sure that the experience is uniform across all apps.
This has required key contributions from the Indian engineering and design teams for various areas of expertise, but the development process, as with everything, has remained global," a second executive said. Also read | With AI in Indian iPhones, can Apple rival
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