iOS App default Language "en" is not applied

Question

in Xcode 4.6.3 I set the "Localization native development region" = en.

I provide my app with Spanish, English and Russian locales.

Unfortunately when I set the Language of the Iphone Simulator to for example "German" my app uses then the Spanish locale.

I suspect because I have a "Spanish Computer".

But I would like that the customers of my app get English if their locale is not provided by the app.

How can I ensure this?

One thing I noticed. In the "copy bundle resources" tab I see my other Localizable.strings files appear red. But I know that they are being despite red deployed...

Answer 1

Actual language which the app will have has a dynamic nature because it depends on a dynamic list in device settings. iOS will fall down through it and choose the 1st supported language.

Let's consider some app supports "en" and "ru". Despite that fact that "en" is much more preferable language for Portuguese locale, "ru" will be chosen because it situated higher than "en" in device settings on the screenshot below.

Answer 2

I had the same issue with one of my apps. What I did is force en as the second language in AppleLanguages and it's working now. You have to do that before the application starts (main). It's a bit of an ugly hack but works for now (NSLocalizedString is looking at that list to determine the language)... You have to be careful though, because you may get some weird stuff from NSLocale after you do that. For example if you want to use the - displayNameForKey:value: it won't be in sync and you'll have to restart the app so you get the correct result. so what you can do is initialize NSLocale with the first element in the [NSLocale preferredLanguages] (NSLocale *currentLocale = [[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:[NSLocale preferredLanguages][0]];) and then it's going to return the expected results.

Here's what you have to do to swap the languages:

// remove what was previously stored in NSUserDefaults (otherwise the previously selected language will be still the first one in the list and your app won't be localized in the language selected in settings)
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] setObject:nil forKey:@"AppleLanguages"];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize]; // make the change immediate

// reorder the languages so English is always the default fallback
NSMutableArray *mutableLanguages = [[NSLocale preferredLanguages] mutableCopy];
NSInteger enIndex = NSNotFound;
for (NSString *lang in mutableLanguages) { if ([lang isEqualToString:@"en"]) { enIndex = [mutableLanguages indexOfObject:lang]; break; } }
@try {
    if ((enIndex != 0) && (enIndex != 1)) { [mutableLanguages exchangeObjectAtIndex:1 withObjectAtIndex:enIndex]; }
} @catch (NSException *exception) {

}
// save the changes
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] setObject:mutableLanguages forKey:@"AppleLanguages"];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize]; // to make the change immediate

return UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, NSStringFromClass([YourAppDelegate class]));