Stop Guessing Languages Based on IP Address
On the topic of language, a problem I have in India is that many OSs, apps and sites don&#x27;t understand that both &quot;color&quot; and &quot;colour&quot; are okay in India. It&#x27;s more a question of style whether you use the US or British or US spelling, and I don&#x27;t want my spell-checker enforcing style. Neither is really wrong, like &quot;colur&quot; would be.<p>macOS, iOS and Android all get this wrong, insisting on &quot;correcting&quot; color to colour. This happens in both native and web apps. I tried to work around this by adding English (US) as a secondary language, which fixes the issue in iOS but not macOS or Android.<p>A couple of other related points: it&#x27;s irritating when apps don&#x27;t use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane.<p>Another problem with language is that many developers think of I18N as a checklist item to be ticked off. They still use American English like &quot;way to go&quot;. Leave the Americanisms out of it, if you want your non-American users to feel welcome, as opposed to, &quot;This isn&#x27;t for you&quot;. Americans will also understand if &quot;way to go&quot; was replaced by &quot;congrats&quot; or &quot;congratulations&quot;.