I tend to view it as being necessary for Apple to maintain a minimum share in each market to keep iOS viable on a country by country basis. Why? iOS is not a country specific operating system, One of the beautiful programming attributes of iOS is that it takes relatively little effort to take a program and convert it to another language. Granted, for some languages the page designs may have to be modified somewhat for text length, but it is a straighforward exercise and is done visually. For most languages, that is not necessary because iOS 6 and 7 are designed to automatically reformat the screens.
All it takes to create a hindi program is to create a special file that maps the displayed english text to hindi text. The OS takes care of the substitution and knows which languages are left-right, and which are right-left and top-down. It can even handle a left-right language quoting a right-left language in the same sentence.
So bottom line, it's up to the programmer, he can have as many or as few languages as he desires in the same executable. And he can easily create different executables for different regions so that the language file load is smaller. And you can be sure that there are language specific version of programs for countries where there is little or no Apple presence in the country itself. The programmer is interested in the business decision of whether he can make a profit in a market. If he decides he can't, he can find somewhere else where he can.
Should significant demand for his program appear in some unaccessed market, it won't cost him an arm and a leg to make a localized version. Sometimes even a local distributor might be willing to finance a version of a program, to increase his hardware sales. It's just business. |
