Developers Teach Apple Chinese

Like other smartphone makers, Apple is trying to keep China happy. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has made a half-dozen press-swarmed visits since taking over the company in 2011. (Steve Jobs made zero.) Apple began painting its iPhones gold in 2013 explicitly to appeal to the world’s largest smartphone market, Cook said in an interview in June. Although the company missed analysts’ estimates of its quarterly earnings in July largely because China’s demand for iPhones was lower than expected, its revenue in the country more than doubled from a year earlier. The iPhone accounts for the vast majority of China’s high-end smartphone sales.

Apple is also benefiting from work it’s not doing. Since June 2014, more than 100 programmers have contributed to an open source Mandarin Chinese translation of Swift, the in-house programming language Apple uses for iOS development. A round of finishing touches was added last month, making it easier for 850 million native Mandarin speakers to build iOS apps. The project’s originator is Jie Liang, a student at BeiHang University in Beijing, who wrote in a celebratory blog post that he began translating Swift to “synchronize China and the world.”