APT 2: default language

When you set up a new account in the Apple developer Connection, you have to tell them what you think is your default language. If you do that in the usual naive way, you may end up like me, saying: German! Naturally, I am German.

But this way, you end(ed) up distributing German as the default language to all countries worldwide. Which is not so natural. When I found this out, I filed a feature request online for changing this. [UPDATE 6. Feb 2012:] Apple has enabled to change the default language for every new app. For existing apps, I could not change anything. As of today, Apple offers 18 different languages or language variants that you can describe your app in. For a complete list of which language is used where, see my newer post. [/UPDATE]
But I found something interesting:

• If I only have a German description, then the whole world gets the German text – as expected.
• When I add an English description in iTunes Connect, the US gets English description, but the other countries still get German (I did not test all countries, but it seemed that way). This was a little disappointing. I had expected a bigger change.
• When I add UK English text as well, then nearly all countries that are not in the remaining list, get an English description too. The remaining countries (e.g. Swedish, Russian, Italian are in that list) still get German until I add a different description there as well.

So in case you don’t care about these “list” countries, e.g. China, Russia, Germany, then it is only a “double effort”: English and UK English. Else it is about 18 times – or a good choice of default language of your app.