If its important enough to put in on boarding, its important to have it handily available through easy to access means during regular use.
I‘m really not sure what else Apple could do other than:
- Asking during onboarding
- Putting it in Display as well as Accessibility settings
- Having a control center button
Text size? Same - I often have to show something to my elderly family members, but digging deep into the menu's to find the Text Size setting is very distracting.
I think what's happening in this thread is that people are simply attempting to justify bad design decisions without thinking things through. Language should be something you can change, with ease. Same with text size. Ditto, Wifi access, etc.
That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next on the menu" is contrived at best.
The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.
If that's the best argument, Apple is doing pretty well.
I'm switching languages I type in every whatsapp conversation.
On an older Android version that doesn't track per chat language, I have to switch the keyboard every single time. Three languages. And I happen to know more.
You don’t need to change the whole OS’s language to type in multiple languages!
3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control.
Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...
Then everyone does it a bit differently and there is this pre-parsing phase trying to understand which idiom people have written the text.
> That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one
I've lived in similar households. In KDE one can change the language on the fly for any arbitrary application or the desktop manager.
The Russian-speaking girlfriend, the Hebrew-speaking children, and the Spanish-speaking regular can all use KDE comfortably. I was actually surprised when I had to use an English-language Windows machine and could not change the language on the fly.
The vast majority of users in some countries may never change language, but there are other countries where multiple languages are officially spoken and where even members of the same household have different first languages.
For the phone form factor I would think that maybe language switching isn't as important since most people are not sharing their phones often, but for the iPad it might be more useful to be able to switch languages quickly.
I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)
FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:
- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.
- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.
This is what frustrates me about consumer electronics, that if you have a use case that the vendor doesn't want to support then you'll be constantly frustrated over what could be a simple software change.
Bingo! Apple have acquired immense expertise in applying this anti-pattern.
Better than cramming every such feature as a first priority, and making a UI that's confusing for everyday use.
They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them. Better than having all such settings front and center over more commonly used settings.
But they don't. You're a reader of HN. It is fairly obvious that you're the sort of person who, at a point when you need to accomplish something you don't know how to accomplish, will assume that it's possible and start with research. But there are a lot of people out there who will start with the assumption that not being able to see their phone screen so well anymore is just something to put up with. The entire point of this post and discussion is that Apple may not be providing the best experience for those users for whom it would never even cross their mind that changing the text size on their phone is possible.
Even most young people I know are not able to google things (even if it's some important information they urgently need). Or maybe they just don't get the idea of even asking the internet.
It's not like you're learning a new language everyday. Nor losing your eyesight. Keep in mind that the life of a cellphone is anywhere between one and six years, for most tends to be around three (speculation). Isn't reason enough to make it a top priority for people to be able to access language / text size changes in their settings everyday.