China gets key iOS 8 upgrades and QuickType love from Apple

Apple’s Tim Cook at WWDC today just announced that nearly half of China’s new iOS users switched away from Android. But this small claim to Chinese mobile growth, an hour later, is eclipsed by Apple’s announcement that it would be supporting China on iOS in even more ways. In fact, China was the only country that Apple’s executives Tim Cook and Craig Federighi mentioned on stage.

Nuevas mejoras en China #WWDC5X1 #iOS8 pic.twitter.com/ckg9WbYAWk

— Apple 5×1 (@Apple5x1) June 2, 2014

As the image above indicates, Apple has extended its Maps support considerably for Chinese users. Thus, Chinese users will have an easier time navigating the country. Apple hasn’t stopped there, it’s also adapted more weather data, and most importantly improved the predictive input. In other words, Mandarin is getting a bigger boost of language support from Apple. Plus, the lunar calendar will also be packed into iOS 8 to help its Chinese users find out traditional holidays all within their iOS mobile devices.

Apple also introduced, among its many third party app killers (Apple is now in direct war with Alfred, Dropbox, Snapchat, Gmail, Evernote’s Skitch, Google Translate, and more) a Swype killer. QuickType, Apple’s iOS 8 upgrade for its keyboard, which intelligently suggests words to be included in messages based on who you’re sending to is also available in Chinese and Japanese. Apple ensures users that their keystrokes are recorded on the devices and not sent to its servers.

See: Apple’s greater China revenues approach a record $10 billion

Very interested to see QuickType for Chinese, parsing in the way they're demonstrating seems really dicey.

— Michael Love (@elkmovie) June 2, 2014

Quicktype supports Japanese and Chinese too #WWDC

— 星野恵瑠@メモオフ6NR iOS版配信中 (@lovee) June 2, 2014

In relation to Asia, Federighi also introduced considerable new openness to iOS extensions. Federighi opened up Safari on the iPad and demoed Bing translation editing Japanese language on a music website. No doubt, this is Apple’s jab at taking on Google Translate on mobile.