The world continues to talk about the growing market share of Apple products in India. Sure, that’s happening. At the same time, something very interesting is coming up on the iPhone.
April will be a big month when expanded language support arrives as part of a software update. Users will be able to update the primary iPhone language to Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu or Urdu.
The implementation goes deep into the system. It will surely help Apple capture the attention of first-time phone buyers. iPhone that displays all the system options in Bengali? Why not.
It will be available on iPhones that are eligible to receive Apple’s iOS 18.4 update that supports these languages. And the language support will be available in every part of the system, be it the clock app or camera or weather. Further, all third-party developers will be able to integrate system language support to offer the same level of customised experience across apps.
“The scripts with the 10 new languages are to my eye just beautiful. I love the fact that it marries many local elements together with our love of typography. It brings it all together,” Bob Borchers, vice-president, worldwide product marketing, Apple, recently told The Telegraph.
Across the system
There is a deep level of localisation that we are looking at with the 10 new languages. For example, one of the most used sections in the iPhone involves the health app and fitness metrics. You can access all of that in the language of your choice.
Another look at Indian language support on the iPhone, coming with iOS 18.4
The understand the depth of language implementation, we recently looked at the shortcuts menu. Everything is organised alphabetically to make it easier for you to spot options.
The same goes for widgets, like the Calendar. The names of the months are not simple transliteration; they are mentioned in the script we find it in, say, Bengali. Let’s move to the Clock widget. The city names are, also, not transliterations.
Completing milestones
Google’s Android has been supporting Indic languages for some years and last year, Google rolled out support for its Gemini AI platform in several Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Many people prefer to buy gadgets from shops. Soon people from across India can walk into a shop and see the iPhone functioning in, say, Bengali or Malayalam, making them feel more at home with the device. It will help Apple win customers beyond big cities.
Apple’s growing presence in India is clearly visible. CEO Tim Cook during the company’s first-quarter earnings call a few weeks ago said: “India set a December-quarter record during the quarter, and we’re opening more stores there. We’ve announced that we’re going to open four new stores there. The iPhone was the top-selling model in India for the quarter, and it’s the second-largest smartphone market in the world and the third-largest for PCs and tablets, so there’s a huge market, and we have a very modest share in these markets, and so I think there’s lots of upside there, and that’s just one of the emerging markets.”
It ties in with what Cook told The Telegraph when the first Apple retail stores opened in India in 2023: “What we are is a toolmaker…. It wasn’t too many years ago when you would kind of (get) pushed into a career path of an engineer, or a doctor maybe. And now it’s so great that there’s a creative community that’s blossoming out there. It’s quite alive in India.”
Apple’s India story has been in the works for decades. Visit YouTube and you will find a 1996 Apple Macintosh advertisement featuring actor Samir Soni. It is set in a corporate office at a time when Windows PCs were everywhere. Soni’s character in the ad demonstrates that the Mac can seamlessly run Windows software. The ad ends with the punchline: “Does more. Costs less. It’s that simple.”
In 2008, the iPhone 3G made its debut in India and that was a milestone. In 2023, another landmark moment arrived when Apple opened its first two physical stores in India — Apple BKC in Mumbai and Apple Saket in Delhi. Four more stores have been planned for India.
Last week, Apple introduced the iPhone 16e, which belongs to the latest iPhone 16 family and comes with the powerful A18 chip but its pricing is lower than that of iPhone 16 — ₹59,900.