Have you ever saw some apps that do not support English but declare they are supporting Engish on the product page of the App Store?

The most probable reason I think is that they wanted to change the only language supported, but didn’t know how to do, so they just added the language they wanted to support as a new supported language.

Let’s see what we should do to change the only language supported.

Background

So what’s the default setting of localization when we create a brand new Xcode project?

  • Base with All localized files
  • English (Development Language) with no localized file

We can confirm it in the project navigator by selecting the project (not a target) and click Info.

Problem

You may notice that we cannot delete English even we add another language first. And since it’s the Development Language, all localized files of Base will finally belong to English. That’s why some apps that do not support English but declare they are supporting Engish on the product page of the App Store.

An Inappropriate Solution

Let’s do not use Base and move all localized files to the language we want since Base is the reason.

It works since there are no localized files for English in the project.

But the English (Development Language) is still there. So this may solve the issue on the product page of the App Store, but it still is an inappropriate solution.

Solution

Just change the Development Language to the language we want.

Open project.pbxproj file in our project’s .xcodeproj package, search for region.

developmentRegion = en;
knownRegions = (
    en,
    Base,
);

Then change the en (both in developmentRegion and knownRegions) to the language code1 we want.

developmentRegion = ja;
knownRegions = (
    ja,
    Base,
);

That’s it, check the info tag again, the only language supported by the Xcode project has been changed to the language we want.

XcodeGen

XcodeGen uses the .lproj folders to determine knownRegions, so all we need to do is adding one line to your options.

options:
  developmentLanguage: ja

  1. If you don’t know the code of the language you want, you can add the language from the info tab then the code will appear in knownRegions. ↩