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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard

I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?

In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"

Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone security for law enforcement and the like, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do it (at any price) unless you could somehow trick them into thinking you had some "interesting" data on there...

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Honestly of the big companies sometimes I feel like Apple is the worse offender in i18n questions

Sure they have most of their stuff translated but some rough edges make me feel they do the bare minimum:

- Their ISO keyboard sucks. Sure their overall quality makes it good but of the major brands their Enter key is the most flimsy attempt at it

- Some long standing bugs https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250299816?sortBy=rank (which I had the impressions they were made worse in localized version or at least if you used a non American date format)

- General weirdness with translation missing sometimes

I remember switching to English, decades ago, after running into misaligned/cut-off localized text in the UI. I'm still using English to this day.

And from what I've seen, Apple's always supported fewer languages and input methods than Google/Microsoft, like they simply cant be bothered.

> Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?

I don't think we can assume the team is large.

While user base is well into billions. There are bound to be niche exceptions like this.

The team is even larger if you consider that any past member counts - you only need to think about it once and add a test

Sound like it’s not about removal from keyboard but rather ability to enter standalone?

It’s a combining accent character. It’s used to alter other characters (e.g. “c” to “č”). It doesn’t make sense to use it standalone.

Apple probably fixed a bug and https://xkcd.com/1172/ followed.

Many people here are discussing a phase out. Just add an obscure key combo that won’t be triggered via normal use, and leave it there forever.

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