My Samsung watch is great in every way, but ALL THE DATES ARE HARDCODED TO BE MM/DD/YYYY in EVERY watch face option that I actually like.
WHY?! It's JUST the watch faces too, like the internal stuff understands just fine that I'm a Dutch person who wants everything in English - my weather is in celcius, my currency is the euro.
BUT NOT MY WATCHFACE, NOOOO.
Anyway, i FEEL your pain.
Here's another one: Why are CSVs, COMMA Separated Values, file formats separated by F#&£+#_@ SEMICOLONS in regions of the EU????? WHY???? Every freaking .csv I receive from a client (because I've got all my own region setting locally set to the UK to prevent this on my computer, and I just deal with the pound currency being standard) is separated by a SEMICOLON - but it's a COMMA. SEPARATED. VALUES. FILE!!!! WHO DECIDED THIS?!?!
Wouldn't the reason CSV files use separators other than commas in the EU be because most countries there use commas for decimal values? From what I could find on the history of CSV files on Wikipedia, it was created in the US where we use periods for decimal values (like the UK).
I had to write a CSV parser for my first non-internship job and it was a massive pain to get it to handle all the weird ambiguous or broken stuff people threw at it. It's one of those things I (now) would not recommend anyone inexperienced do themselves, a bit like timestamp handling or cryptography.
As someone who occasionally wrangles CSVs by hand (for some reason my bank's web application removed the ability to export excel spreadsheets directly a few years ago) I'm guilty of using Excel's semicolons for simplicity, but the Office team should have stuck with commas and double quotes.
The Microsoft Excel team in the 90s. I thought Joel Spolsky had written about this topic, being one of the leaders of the team that made this decision, but I was mistaken.
CSVs are ubiquitous yet almost never generated by hand
It's kind of crazy that we've had a Unit Separator which would work well for this since ASCII-1967 but people just can't stop using commas! We've had 58 YEARS!!
Bonus: Why does my band NEED to be connected at all times AND paid for with a subscription in order to be able to analyze my blood flow in real time? And why does it advertise this function by making it seem like the capability isn't there before I pay? I mean, paying a subscription isn't going to make new hardware appear that wasn't there to begin with.
They have to milk money from you somehow and paying each month is the best scenario for them.
People should just stop buying stuff like that. But alas, they are just Average Joes that don't care and will buy and eventually pay for every subscription because there will be no alternative.
Speaking about alternatives - maybe your band would work with Gadgetbridge, open source software for wearables. Maybe have a look at their compatibility page
I thank my lucky stars all the time for irritated nerds. They are the ones who have hacked stuff to make a lot of devices I use able to break free of their corporate owners. I followed a tutorial to jailbreak my kindle, now it runs Koreader, which is ugly as sin, but is entirely cut off from amazon. Similar is true of various sensors I have around the house, various bits of tech. I wouldn't have a chance of doing that on my own, my choice would be buy/don't buy. But thankfully someone with the skills has got irritated enough with the idea of [insert corpo here] snooping around that they've taken their time to hack a way out and then shared it. Brilliant.
Yeah, it’s a really annoying problem. iOS breaks a bunch of things, like temperature units, decimal separators, etc off of the standard localization, so that users with preferences can customize. The problem is so many developers just ignore them.
The Bordeaux transit app uses 24 hour time if the language is set to French, but 12 hour time if it’s set to English. Despite the fact that there is a separate setting for 12 or 24 hour time.
Then there are some really popular apps that are made by small low budget developers, such as Apple Maps and Apple Fitness. If you don’t know, these are made by a small company called Apple. They are the first trillion dollar company, and just don’t have the budget to implement these things at all. Both of these apps use the decimal separator based on the region, not the explicitly set decimal separator. I keep meaning to send a feedback about this, but, like, I shouldn’t have to. This is not some esoteric bug, it’s a simple setting that Apple should have automated tests for.
At least on iOS, the capability is there should developers choose to leverage it (I try to). It’s a lot more messy on the Android side, with devs being left to fend for themselves when it comes to several aspects of localization.
Apple not leveraging their own APIs unfortunately is a growing trend. I have no proof but I suspect it’s tied to engineers cycling out, with the vets who had spent their lives working on or with NeXT/OS X/iOS APIs being replaced by fresh grads with no experience at all.
I have done almost zero iOS development, so tell me if this is wrong.
Isn’t it more work to do what Apple Maps and fitness do than to use the stock apis? Like isn’t proper support just to use swift NumberFormatter? And to get the behavior I am seeing, they have to build their own one-off number formatting functions into the app? I can understand just defaulting to periods for decimals. I can even understand the Bordeaux metro app which just has options for English and French, so they only need two mappings. But the Apple apps support every language and region iOS does. Doesn’t that mean they have to build their own internal mapping of region > number format without using the stock iOS one?
That’s my understanding, yes. It really doesn’t make any sense unless either you’re a developer coming from platforms that don’t give you a hand with things like this (and thus assume that iOS doesn’t either) or you have design requirements that the formatters can’t accommodate for some strange reason (which in my mind means that the design needs tweaking).
I have a similar problem, which I learned to live with: I don’t live in my original country, and even though all of my devices are set to English, most of the big web resources I use (think Google, Microsoft and any other shitty corp products) get automatically set to the language of the place I live in - not what I set in my device.
It’s the sort of “blanket” implementation & lack of UX I have come to expect from mega-corps.
My favorite is "oh, you've selected to see the version of this site from your country? That's nice; here's the one from your current location!"
My second favorite is "oh, you're in Europe? We're only going to offer you European countries, even though you've been using this site in your home country for years."
I live in Switzerland, which has 4 official languages, most notably French, German and Italian.
When I was playing Rainbow Six Siege years ago, opening Ubisoft's website to read the game's patch notes prompted me to choose one of the 3 languages I mentioned. There simply was no English option. Changing the URL, clicking on another link etc. all redirected to the site that made me choose one of the local languages.
This "forced accommodation" is incredibly annoying and I can't fathom why they keep doing it.
There's a slight positive on this, is that most advertisement I receive is in German, the majority language of my country. I don't speak nor read German or any of the dialect, so online ad has less chance of even subliminally affect me.
German is especially complex, though. There's a reason that the US government classifies German with Indonesian, Malay, and Swahili, rather than with the "languages closely related to English." As far as I'm aware, Icelandic is the only Germanic language at or above it, whereas all of the Romance languages are below it.
I think the most distressing kind of localisation I've ever encountered is in Microsoft Office where the keyboard shortcuts are also changed to match the language. Switch away from English (or have it changed for you by Microsoft like you describe) and CTRL-S is no longer "save" because the other language uses another word with another letter.
Word will let you remap keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-S, but Excel won't, so you can save your muscle memory in one part of a program, but not another. I wish there were a way to change keyboard shortcut locale only (although it'd probably be locked down by my work IT department...)
Ooh, you touch on a really interesting point that I hadn't considered here. Maybe the shift away from user configuration has been driven by corporate think that prioritises ease of locking down over user experience
Stopped reading at Horizon Zero Dawn. It works in Linux. I played it on my Gentoo and I finished it on Steam Deck. In fact I just did some test yesterday on my PC and used HZD for that.
There must be problen in your setup. Are other (hardware heavier) games working? Maybe you are missing some (32bit) libs...
I'm gonna go back to reading the post now, and maybe add more here later.
For me, I dared try to have 2 languages on my phone. I live in a bilingual country and it's helpful for my job sometimes if I can check what's in its mobile app in both languages. So, of course I can't change the app setting, I have to change my entire phone's language to change the app language.
Fine, I found this kind of fun, since I'm fluent in English but weaker in French, so switching to French offered a little immersion. This switching confused some websites, and sometimes I'd get a page loaded in the opposite of my current setting. Whatever not a big deal, I can read either language well enough.
Until Youtube decided to start auto-dubbing English videos into French, with no way to toggle it off! It didn't matter if I set English as my main language in my phone, still the dubs. Eventually I had to remove French entirely from my phone to solve the issue.
Oof, the Youtube auto-dubbing was a problem I didn't remember, but now that you mention it, this has been bothering me a lot.
I understand that they want people to use the new functions they implement but it's imo the most ignorant thing ever to have that functionality and no way to toggle it off. It's either assuming or forcing people into monolinguality little by little.
Or how websites consistently put you in the correct country, but with the wrong language. Fine, you'd think, so everyone outside the country believes one language is dominant, were it not that all my colleagues on the other side of the language border report exactly the same thing!
I'm not too surprised to hear that the Huawei band had some translation issues in its software. In my limited experience, Chinese brands still struggle quite a bit with English translations in their software. I briefly owned and used a Xiaomi 14 phone from 2023 and the software on that was riddled with odd or inaccurate translations.
As for why these companies don't just give you granular settings, they don't give you that control because the majority of users simply don't care. I understand your frustrations because I have been in that position but the average user couldn't care less. It's not so much cultural ignorance as it is the analytics and feedback given to these companies that leads to products like this. I used to work on a piece of software that had roughly 10M daily active users. We had a pretty active support forum for reported bugs and feature requests and even the most popular tickets on there only had around a few thousand votes. That's not even 1% of users. If a more significant portion of users in an area complained or a big enough customer complained about something, then things would change. This is also why it feels like big companies often give features users don't want. It can be hard to look at a feature request, see that not even 1% of your users indicated that they want it, and then make a decision on if it should be built. I don't know how Microsoft operates but the company I worked for would only really listen to feature requests and bug reports if it were reported on their internal platforms, not Twitter or Reddit.
Going to your point about letting users decide what they want when setting up hardware/software, it's the same reason as above, the average user simply does not care enough. Given enough choices, you could also simply spook the user and drive them away. I know it sounds silly in this context of setting the timezone and language but that's just how it is. The software I mentioned above that I worked on gives users a ton of choices when setting things up for how things should be laid out, organized, look, etc. We gave users a few presets and then also gave them the option to change things to their liking. From the analytics we gathered, very few people would ever switch away from the default preset, and even less would customize things to how they want. They would simply let the system pick for them and move on.
Thank you for this reply, I now understand this problem a little better even though I have zero experience in this field.
For as long as I can remember, for at least some things there's always been the option between quick setup (select all recommended settings) and manual setup (manually toggle all settings you want). This is mostly a thing on computer software, but I think it would be good to have on mobile apps also. Understandably, it would cost money to implement, but I think it would really benefit both the developers and the end users in the long run.
Oh yeah I 100% agree, businesses should focus on giving consumers the best possible experience. Unfortunately, the small cost that businesses incur by making their software more configurable is enough to deter them from ever doing so. It's also the reason why you often see software products from small companies and teams often being better than ones from bigger companies and teams.
My related pet peeve is how so many systems equate keyboard layouts with language. Yes, I do prefer UK English everywhere and sure, I live in a non English speaking country. But still, dear Windows 11, I have told you countless times that my keyboard layout is (modded) US English, so why in the name of everything holy do you insist randomly installing and activating either the UK English layout or the layout for the language that people speak around me. I don't need or want them. And I particularly don't need or want them to be silently installed and activated before I try to log in, as I can't then type in my login password.
Or even worse, dear iPhone, why do I need to change my whole keyboard layout to get spelling suggestions and corrections in different languages? Why can't I just the same layout for all of the languages that I frequently type in? The constant layout switching kills muscle memory and makes the user experience worse for an already absolutely terrible software keyboard.
Geographical locations don't equate with language, and keyboard layouts don't either. I don't understand why it's so difficult for software designers to understand this.
Or well, I do. I'm in such a small minority that my needs don't matter at all in the big picture. But it still doesn't mean that I'm not annoyed.
A while back, I worked and lived in central Europe, using a tethered mobile phone as my main internet connection for my laptop computer(s).
Occasionally, despite setting language settings in my browser and on Windows itself, small websites like Google would determine I'm located somewhere I'm actually not when accessing my email, and serve me a login page in another language.
Sometimes it wasn't that bad, like Czech, or Portuguese, but imagine trying to see if you got any new mail, Google thinking you're in Armenia, and seeing Armenian for the first time:
Սա հայերեն նախադասության օրինակ է՝ իմ տեսակետը լուսաբանելու համար։
Or, alternatively, Georgian:
ეს არის ქართული წინადადების ნიმუში ჩემი აზრის საილუსტრაციოდ.
And no fiddling would fix that. I basically had to wait a few hours for my IP address to change so that I knew what was going on.
A similar thing happened recently with USPS (or UPS?), of all places; I got pages served to me in Polish, despite being in Canada. I think it's because I have a Polish software keyboard input layout installed and that's the first (non-English?) one they detected. I have no idea why Polish of all languages, since I also have Japanese and French inputs.
Of course, in every single country, the only language is the standard national language, which is always a single language and immigrants don't exist /s. Especially in Finland, where there are parts where Swedish and Sami have either official or co-official status.
What does this have to do with US-defaultism? About 25 million Americans can't speak English very well and the US has the world's largest immigrant population.
It simply seems a small part of effects of profit and data driven development and overall abysmal computer literacy rates.
Basically any mainstream sw will assume what the users actually want and ignore the input to the contrary while not exposing any settings to change this behaviour.
It is best visible on search engines which do not even pretend to return useful accurate results anymore or on social media serving their content in how they decide, ignoring user preference altogether.
I raised topics advocating for more computer literacy and even on Tildes I get at best mixed reactions.
Posting in solidarity, as this is possibly my biggest pet peeve of all time. It happens constantly.
I still remember The Witness forcibly being in Portuguese and the devs shrugging it off. "It's your language!" No, fuck off, respect my system settings god damn it!
And if you're from Portugal, half of the time they will force you into Portuguese (Brazilian) localizations, which can have a significantly different lexicon. Or if the devs are extra clueless, Spanish.
Related: I also use the English (UK) trick to force Windows to display metric while remaining in English. But this forces my calendar to be in Sunday-Saturday mode rather than Monday-Sunday mode! Also, I don't remember exactly why but I am forced to have the English keyboard layout installed as well, which I do not want. I've been trained in its use since childhood, but it's completely useless (no additional symbols) and I keep selecting it by accident when swapping between Portuguese and Japanese...
I ran into something similar with Google Keyboard which despite having the language set to English (US) would keep using English (regional) which was not one of the languages added and not even set on a system level on Android. This kept being a persistent issue so now I'm using another keyboard app.
Noox | a day ago
My Samsung watch is great in every way, but ALL THE DATES ARE HARDCODED TO BE MM/DD/YYYY in EVERY watch face option that I actually like.
WHY?! It's JUST the watch faces too, like the internal stuff understands just fine that I'm a Dutch person who wants everything in English - my weather is in celcius, my currency is the euro.
BUT NOT MY WATCHFACE, NOOOO.
Anyway, i FEEL your pain.
Here's another one: Why are CSVs, COMMA Separated Values, file formats separated by F#&£+#_@ SEMICOLONS in regions of the EU????? WHY???? Every freaking .csv I receive from a client (because I've got all my own region setting locally set to the UK to prevent this on my computer, and I just deal with the pound currency being standard) is separated by a SEMICOLON - but it's a COMMA. SEPARATED. VALUES. FILE!!!! WHO DECIDED THIS?!?!
Thank you for listening to my rant.
artvandelay | a day ago
Wouldn't the reason CSV files use separators other than commas in the EU be because most countries there use commas for decimal values? From what I could find on the history of CSV files on Wikipedia, it was created in the US where we use periods for decimal values (like the UK).
Protected | 9 hours ago
I had to write a CSV parser for my first non-internship job and it was a massive pain to get it to handle all the weird ambiguous or broken stuff people threw at it. It's one of those things I (now) would not recommend anyone inexperienced do themselves, a bit like timestamp handling or cryptography.
As someone who occasionally wrangles CSVs by hand (for some reason my bank's web application removed the ability to export excel spreadsheets directly a few years ago) I'm guilty of using Excel's semicolons for simplicity, but the Office team should have stuck with commas and double quotes.
1.2,1.3,1.4
"1,2","1,3","1,4"
tibpoe | 18 hours ago
The Microsoft Excel team in the 90s. I thought Joel Spolsky had written about this topic, being one of the leaders of the team that made this decision, but I was mistaken.
This isn't even the worst data-corrupting Excel misbehavior
xk3 | a day ago
CSVs are ubiquitous yet almost never generated by hand
It's kind of crazy that we've had a Unit Separator which would work well for this since ASCII-1967 but people just can't stop using commas! We've had 58 YEARS!!
Ah well ... it's too late to change it
Macha | 9 hours ago
Too much software thinking a naive string.split or string.join is sufficient for CSV handling :(
[OP] evercarrot | a day ago
Bonus: Why does my band NEED to be connected at all times AND paid for with a subscription in order to be able to analyze my blood flow in real time? And why does it advertise this function by making it seem like the capability isn't there before I pay? I mean, paying a subscription isn't going to make new hardware appear that wasn't there to begin with.
I'm just tired of the constant subterfuge.
Pavouk106 | a day ago
They have to milk money from you somehow and paying each month is the best scenario for them.
People should just stop buying stuff like that. But alas, they are just Average Joes that don't care and will buy and eventually pay for every subscription because there will be no alternative.
Speaking about alternatives - maybe your band would work with Gadgetbridge, open source software for wearables. Maybe have a look at their compatibility page
EDIT: typos
[OP] evercarrot | 19 hours ago
Wow, it really didn't even cross my mind that this would be a thing, Definitely something I'm going to check out.
Thank you for this!
Nsutdwa | 11 hours ago
I thank my lucky stars all the time for irritated nerds. They are the ones who have hacked stuff to make a lot of devices I use able to break free of their corporate owners. I followed a tutorial to jailbreak my kindle, now it runs Koreader, which is ugly as sin, but is entirely cut off from amazon. Similar is true of various sensors I have around the house, various bits of tech. I wouldn't have a chance of doing that on my own, my choice would be buy/don't buy. But thankfully someone with the skills has got irritated enough with the idea of [insert corpo here] snooping around that they've taken their time to hack a way out and then shared it. Brilliant.
Weldawadyathink | a day ago
Yeah, it’s a really annoying problem. iOS breaks a bunch of things, like temperature units, decimal separators, etc off of the standard localization, so that users with preferences can customize. The problem is so many developers just ignore them.
The Bordeaux transit app uses 24 hour time if the language is set to French, but 12 hour time if it’s set to English. Despite the fact that there is a separate setting for 12 or 24 hour time.
Then there are some really popular apps that are made by small low budget developers, such as Apple Maps and Apple Fitness. If you don’t know, these are made by a small company called Apple. They are the first trillion dollar company, and just don’t have the budget to implement these things at all. Both of these apps use the decimal separator based on the region, not the explicitly set decimal separator. I keep meaning to send a feedback about this, but, like, I shouldn’t have to. This is not some esoteric bug, it’s a simple setting that Apple should have automated tests for.
ButteredToast | a day ago
At least on iOS, the capability is there should developers choose to leverage it (I try to). It’s a lot more messy on the Android side, with devs being left to fend for themselves when it comes to several aspects of localization.
Apple not leveraging their own APIs unfortunately is a growing trend. I have no proof but I suspect it’s tied to engineers cycling out, with the vets who had spent their lives working on or with NeXT/OS X/iOS APIs being replaced by fresh grads with no experience at all.
Weldawadyathink | a day ago
I have done almost zero iOS development, so tell me if this is wrong.
Isn’t it more work to do what Apple Maps and fitness do than to use the stock apis? Like isn’t proper support just to use swift NumberFormatter? And to get the behavior I am seeing, they have to build their own one-off number formatting functions into the app? I can understand just defaulting to periods for decimals. I can even understand the Bordeaux metro app which just has options for English and French, so they only need two mappings. But the Apple apps support every language and region iOS does. Doesn’t that mean they have to build their own internal mapping of region > number format without using the stock iOS one?
ButteredToast | a day ago
That’s my understanding, yes. It really doesn’t make any sense unless either you’re a developer coming from platforms that don’t give you a hand with things like this (and thus assume that iOS doesn’t either) or you have design requirements that the formatters can’t accommodate for some strange reason (which in my mind means that the design needs tweaking).
TumblingTurquoise | a day ago
I have a similar problem, which I learned to live with: I don’t live in my original country, and even though all of my devices are set to English, most of the big web resources I use (think Google, Microsoft and any other shitty corp products) get automatically set to the language of the place I live in - not what I set in my device.
It’s the sort of “blanket” implementation & lack of UX I have come to expect from mega-corps.
updawg | a day ago
My favorite is "oh, you've selected to see the version of this site from your country? That's nice; here's the one from your current location!"
My second favorite is "oh, you're in Europe? We're only going to offer you European countries, even though you've been using this site in your home country for years."
Barney | 9 hours ago
I live in Switzerland, which has 4 official languages, most notably French, German and Italian.
When I was playing Rainbow Six Siege years ago, opening Ubisoft's website to read the game's patch notes prompted me to choose one of the 3 languages I mentioned. There simply was no English option. Changing the URL, clicking on another link etc. all redirected to the site that made me choose one of the local languages.
This "forced accommodation" is incredibly annoying and I can't fathom why they keep doing it.
PetitPrince | a day ago
There's a slight positive on this, is that most advertisement I receive is in German, the majority language of my country. I don't speak nor read German or any of the dialect, so online ad has less chance of even subliminally affect me.
updawg | a day ago
I haven't considered that. My disgust at German grammar keeps me from paying attention to ads. Nice.
CptBluebear | 13 hours ago
German (the language) catching some strays here. Deserved imo, but you can take most Germanic languages out behind the shed then.
updawg | 5 hours ago
German is especially complex, though. There's a reason that the US government classifies German with Indonesian, Malay, and Swahili, rather than with the "languages closely related to English." As far as I'm aware, Icelandic is the only Germanic language at or above it, whereas all of the Romance languages are below it.
MrNoPro | a day ago
I think the most distressing kind of localisation I've ever encountered is in Microsoft Office where the keyboard shortcuts are also changed to match the language. Switch away from English (or have it changed for you by Microsoft like you describe) and CTRL-S is no longer "save" because the other language uses another word with another letter.
[OP] evercarrot | 19 hours ago
This was something I couldn't even imagine, it sounds so horrible.
Nsutdwa | 13 hours ago
Word will let you remap keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-S, but Excel won't, so you can save your muscle memory in one part of a program, but not another. I wish there were a way to change keyboard shortcut locale only (although it'd probably be locked down by my work IT department...)
rich_27 | 12 hours ago
Ooh, you touch on a really interesting point that I hadn't considered here. Maybe the shift away from user configuration has been driven by corporate think that prioritises ease of locking down over user experience
Pavouk106 | a day ago
Stopped reading at Horizon Zero Dawn. It works in Linux. I played it on my Gentoo and I finished it on Steam Deck. In fact I just did some test yesterday on my PC and used HZD for that.
There must be problen in your setup. Are other (hardware heavier) games working? Maybe you are missing some (32bit) libs...
I'm gonna go back to reading the post now, and maybe add more here later.
lackofaname | a day ago
For me, I dared try to have 2 languages on my phone. I live in a bilingual country and it's helpful for my job sometimes if I can check what's in its mobile app in both languages. So, of course I can't change the app setting, I have to change my entire phone's language to change the app language.
Fine, I found this kind of fun, since I'm fluent in English but weaker in French, so switching to French offered a little immersion. This switching confused some websites, and sometimes I'd get a page loaded in the opposite of my current setting. Whatever not a big deal, I can read either language well enough.
Until Youtube decided to start auto-dubbing English videos into French, with no way to toggle it off! It didn't matter if I set English as my main language in my phone, still the dubs. Eventually I had to remove French entirely from my phone to solve the issue.
[OP] evercarrot | 19 hours ago
Oof, the Youtube auto-dubbing was a problem I didn't remember, but now that you mention it, this has been bothering me a lot.
I understand that they want people to use the new functions they implement but it's imo the most ignorant thing ever to have that functionality and no way to toggle it off. It's either assuming or forcing people into monolinguality little by little.
stewedrabbit | 14 hours ago
Or how websites consistently put you in the correct country, but with the wrong language. Fine, you'd think, so everyone outside the country believes one language is dominant, were it not that all my colleagues on the other side of the language border report exactly the same thing!
updawg | 5 hours ago
And if you live anywhere near a country border, you'll often get the language from the other side.
artvandelay | a day ago
I'm not too surprised to hear that the Huawei band had some translation issues in its software. In my limited experience, Chinese brands still struggle quite a bit with English translations in their software. I briefly owned and used a Xiaomi 14 phone from 2023 and the software on that was riddled with odd or inaccurate translations.
As for why these companies don't just give you granular settings, they don't give you that control because the majority of users simply don't care. I understand your frustrations because I have been in that position but the average user couldn't care less. It's not so much cultural ignorance as it is the analytics and feedback given to these companies that leads to products like this. I used to work on a piece of software that had roughly 10M daily active users. We had a pretty active support forum for reported bugs and feature requests and even the most popular tickets on there only had around a few thousand votes. That's not even 1% of users. If a more significant portion of users in an area complained or a big enough customer complained about something, then things would change. This is also why it feels like big companies often give features users don't want. It can be hard to look at a feature request, see that not even 1% of your users indicated that they want it, and then make a decision on if it should be built. I don't know how Microsoft operates but the company I worked for would only really listen to feature requests and bug reports if it were reported on their internal platforms, not Twitter or Reddit.
Going to your point about letting users decide what they want when setting up hardware/software, it's the same reason as above, the average user simply does not care enough. Given enough choices, you could also simply spook the user and drive them away. I know it sounds silly in this context of setting the timezone and language but that's just how it is. The software I mentioned above that I worked on gives users a ton of choices when setting things up for how things should be laid out, organized, look, etc. We gave users a few presets and then also gave them the option to change things to their liking. From the analytics we gathered, very few people would ever switch away from the default preset, and even less would customize things to how they want. They would simply let the system pick for them and move on.
[OP] evercarrot | 19 hours ago
Thank you for this reply, I now understand this problem a little better even though I have zero experience in this field.
For as long as I can remember, for at least some things there's always been the option between quick setup (select all recommended settings) and manual setup (manually toggle all settings you want). This is mostly a thing on computer software, but I think it would be good to have on mobile apps also. Understandably, it would cost money to implement, but I think it would really benefit both the developers and the end users in the long run.
artvandelay | 4 hours ago
Oh yeah I 100% agree, businesses should focus on giving consumers the best possible experience. Unfortunately, the small cost that businesses incur by making their software more configurable is enough to deter them from ever doing so. It's also the reason why you often see software products from small companies and teams often being better than ones from bigger companies and teams.
vili | a day ago
Yours is not a rant, it's gospel. Preach on!
My related pet peeve is how so many systems equate keyboard layouts with language. Yes, I do prefer UK English everywhere and sure, I live in a non English speaking country. But still, dear Windows 11, I have told you countless times that my keyboard layout is (modded) US English, so why in the name of everything holy do you insist randomly installing and activating either the UK English layout or the layout for the language that people speak around me. I don't need or want them. And I particularly don't need or want them to be silently installed and activated before I try to log in, as I can't then type in my login password.
Or even worse, dear iPhone, why do I need to change my whole keyboard layout to get spelling suggestions and corrections in different languages? Why can't I just the same layout for all of the languages that I frequently type in? The constant layout switching kills muscle memory and makes the user experience worse for an already absolutely terrible software keyboard.
Geographical locations don't equate with language, and keyboard layouts don't either. I don't understand why it's so difficult for software designers to understand this.
Or well, I do. I'm in such a small minority that my needs don't matter at all in the big picture. But it still doesn't mean that I'm not annoyed.
Liru | a day ago
A while back, I worked and lived in central Europe, using a tethered mobile phone as my main internet connection for my laptop computer(s).
Occasionally, despite setting language settings in my browser and on Windows itself, small websites like Google would determine I'm located somewhere I'm actually not when accessing my email, and serve me a login page in another language.
Sometimes it wasn't that bad, like Czech, or Portuguese, but imagine trying to see if you got any new mail, Google thinking you're in Armenia, and seeing Armenian for the first time:
Սա հայերեն նախադասության օրինակ է՝ իմ տեսակետը լուսաբանելու համար։
Or, alternatively, Georgian:
ეს არის ქართული წინადადების ნიმუში ჩემი აზრის საილუსტრაციოდ.
And no fiddling would fix that. I basically had to wait a few hours for my IP address to change so that I knew what was going on.
A similar thing happened recently with USPS (or UPS?), of all places; I got pages served to me in Polish, despite being in Canada. I think it's because I have a Polish software keyboard input layout installed and that's the first (non-English?) one they detected. I have no idea why Polish of all languages, since I also have Japanese and French inputs.
adutchman | 12 hours ago
Of course, in every single country, the only language is the standard national language, which is always a single language and immigrants don't exist /s. Especially in Finland, where there are parts where Swedish and Sami have either official or co-official status.
US defaultism is one helluva drug.
updawg | 5 hours ago
What does this have to do with US-defaultism? About 25 million Americans can't speak English very well and the US has the world's largest immigrant population.
Tiraon | 10 hours ago
It simply seems a small part of effects of profit and data driven development and overall abysmal computer literacy rates.
Basically any mainstream sw will assume what the users actually want and ignore the input to the contrary while not exposing any settings to change this behaviour.
It is best visible on search engines which do not even pretend to return useful accurate results anymore or on social media serving their content in how they decide, ignoring user preference altogether.
I raised topics advocating for more computer literacy and even on Tildes I get at best mixed reactions.
Protected | 9 hours ago
Posting in solidarity, as this is possibly my biggest pet peeve of all time. It happens constantly.
I still remember The Witness forcibly being in Portuguese and the devs shrugging it off. "It's your language!" No, fuck off, respect my system settings god damn it!
And if you're from Portugal, half of the time they will force you into Portuguese (Brazilian) localizations, which can have a significantly different lexicon. Or if the devs are extra clueless, Spanish.
Related: I also use the English (UK) trick to force Windows to display metric while remaining in English. But this forces my calendar to be in Sunday-Saturday mode rather than Monday-Sunday mode! Also, I don't remember exactly why but I am forced to have the English keyboard layout installed as well, which I do not want. I've been trained in its use since childhood, but it's completely useless (no additional symbols) and I keep selecting it by accident when swapping between Portuguese and Japanese...
aetherious | a day ago
I ran into something similar with Google Keyboard which despite having the language set to English (US) would keep using English (regional) which was not one of the languages added and not even set on a system level on Android. This kept being a persistent issue so now I'm using another keyboard app.