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Ask HN: Why can't you set the language individually for most apps?

2 points by mhrmsn ↗ HN
A while ago I set my language in iOS' settings to French to practice my French a bit more. Since then I noticed two things:

- Despite most apps certainly being available globally with multiple languages, they usually do not offer any option within the app to set the language to something different than the system language.

- Even weirder, some apps/services will assume that the system language is your main language and automatically set that language in your account as your main language. For services that can be accessed both on mobile/desktop, that sometimes leads to emails from that service switching back and forth between languages.

Why is that? Especially for the first point: since many apps are in principle available in multiple language, why not give the user the option to choose the language regardless of the OS settings?

2 comments

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dave4420
I don’t understand the use case. Why would someone the OS to use one language, but an application running on that OS to use a different language?
mhrmsn
One example: Most documentation/resources available online are in English, so I use most applications in English, despite that not being my native language so that I'll have it easier to find support online.

There might be other apps where I prefer them to be in my native language (e.g. news apps) or where the use of legal/financial terms makes it difficult as a non-native speaker (e.g. banking/trading apps).

Lastly, it might be interesting for language learners or people regularly switching between languages or countries.

But you might be right that all of those use cases only affect a too small user group, so that there simply is no incentive for developers to add a language switching feature.