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From next month, iPhones eligible to receive Apple’s iOS 18.4 update will support Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. These languages would be applicable across every nook and cranny of the iPhone’s software interface, just the way it already supports languages such as French, Latin or Mandarin Chinese.
Apple’s Indian teams
A senior company executive told Mint that the introduction of the new languages involved “crucial contributions from Apple’s India teams, which work cross-functionally across various aspects of the company’s software development, with their global counterparts.”
“The language support is integrated closely into the Apple interface, and is not just a translation layer. This ensures consistency and the use of colloquial local language terms for various words, such as phrases used in the alarm clock app, or the weather app. All third-party developers will also be able to integrate the system language support to make sure that the experience is uniform across all apps. This has required key contributions from the Indian engineering and design teams for various areas of expertise, but the development process, as with everything, has remained global,” a second executive said.
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iPhone India market
Apple, whose India presence was incorporated almost three decades ago in 1996, only started selling its products in the country through third-party retail partners in 2008, with its second-generation iPhone. But, India has always been a traditionally value-conscious market, and Apple’s phones, laptops, tablets, watches and audio products have always been priced at a significant premium above the average selling price of any device in the country.
This, for the longest time, kept Apple a bit-part player in India’s technology ecosystem. But, since 2019, the company’s India sales have been on a steady rise, driven by wider availability, rising disposable incomes, and easier financing options helping more people to use its devices. Case in point: in 2019, prior to the pandemic, Apple sold 1.5 million iPhones in India—with a 0.9% market share by volume.
In 2024, the company was estimated to have sold nearly 12.5 million iPhones in India, as per Counterpoint India and IDC India—with a net market share of around 8%. This year, Apple’s sales of its iPhone, the company’s best-selling gadget in India accounting for at least two-thirds of its revenue in the country, are expected to grow a further 20% over 2024. Experts believe that local language support will only make its growth pitch even stronger, and maintain pace for more years to come.
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Introducing loacl languages
“Introducing native support for languages definitely makes a case for Apple’s buyers to consider the brand, when it is compared with another brand on the retail shop floor. Android and Windows have had support for Indic languages for a while now, but Apple did not. So, when a buyer now goes to a store and finds this too, it is an added incentive for them to consider Apple’s devices—after all, the iPhone is still the phone that Indians want to buy, despite it being expensive,” said Navkendar Singh, associate vice-president at market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) India.
Apple did not respond to Mint’s queries on how many Indian employees were involved in the process, or the time it took to integrate local languages into its software platforms.
Google’s Android, which powers over 95% of all active smartphones in India, has supported Indic languages natively for over five years now. Last year, Google used its India engineering presence to roll out support for its ‘Gemini’ AI platform in nine local languages. In comparison, Apple’s launch of AI next month will only include support for the English language—leaving Google with the upper hand in its efforts to appeal to Indian users.
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“This shouldn’t hurt Apple, though—its target is always the smaller subset of users in comparison with other brands and platforms. But even in that, we still expect it to maintain its double-digit annual growth pace for at least another three years. Local language support will only make its positioning stronger, and help tap the tier-II markets and beyond since that would be a new market for Apple to enter into,” IDC’s Singh said.
A senior analyst at another market research firm said that even for top-tier users, the addition of the new languages would make a big difference. “Non-resident Indians are big users of Apple’s native apps such as iMessage and FaceTime, as opposed to WhatsApp. Many such users have parents and relatives in India who are not comfortable in English, and for them, the native language support will be a big reason to finally switch to an iPhone, instead of sticking to an Android device,” the analyst said, declining not to be identified.
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