Apple introduces a series of new features and improvements aimed at users in India, China and other international markets with its annual updates for iOS, iPadOS and macOS operating systems.
iOS 14, which will be available to users later this year, introduces new bilingual dictionaries to support French and German. Indonesia and English; Japanese and Simplified Chinese; and Polish and English. For its users in China, one of Apple’s largest overseas markets, the new operating system will introduce support for the Wubi keyboard.
For users in India, Apple is adding 20 new document fonts and updating 18 existing fonts with “more weights and italics” to give users a wider choice. For those who live in the second largest internet market in the world, the mail app now supports email addresses in Indian script.
Apple said it will also provide a number of additional features for India that build on the great momentum it sparked last year.
Messages Now with corresponding full-screen effects when users send greetings like “Happy Holi” in one of the 23 Indian languages.
Interestingly, iOS 14 will include intelligent downloads that users in India can use to download Indians Siri Voices and software updates, and downloading and streaming Apple TV + broadcasts over cellular networks – a feature that is not available worldwide.
The function continues to deal with the patchy networks prevailing in India – despite considerable improvements in recent years. Last year, Apple enabled an improved video download option for users in India that allows them to set a better time of day in video streaming apps like Hotstar and Netflix to download videos.
New improvements further show that Apple is increasingly focusing on India, the second largest smartphone market in the world. Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this year that the company will open its online store in the country later this year and will open its first physical shop next year.
With iOS 14, users in Ireland and Norway can also take advantage of the auto-correction feature, as the new update supports Irish Gaelic and Norwegian Nynorsk. There is also a redesigned Kana keyboard for Japan that makes it easier for users to enter repeated-digit numbers at the level of redesigned numbers and symbols.
All of the above features – with the exception of mail, which has support for email addresses in Indian script and intelligent downloads for India – are also shipped with iPadOS 14. The above new bilingual dictionaries, new fonts for India and localized messages are provided in macOS Big Sur. According to Apple, the desktop operating system has also improved predictive input for Chinese and Japanese results to get more accurate and contextual predictions.