Geofencing makes it almost impossible to access foreign language versions of any of the major sites. I can't get German music in Canada, because I'm directed to the Canadian site, which doesn't sell German music. Same goes for amazon, netflix, and a whole list of others.
It sounds pretty dumb when I generalize it that way, but when I've actually run into it, it made perfect sense how the developers got where they did.
I think there it's technical particulars that lead to this scenario. For web, people don't like to choose their language or country manually. And also for web, there will be multiple different applications kind of strung together through APIs, etc. But the two pieces of information available to everyone is either browser language or geoIP/location. A lot of problems come from one app using browser language and another app using location. And even when you make a bad choice about which to use, it still works for 98%+ of users, so it can be a while until you get a complaint.
Wow, number 4 is shocking. That just seems so fundamentally misguided as a way to go about developing for real users of the world.
Geofencing makes it almost impossible to access foreign language versions of any of the major sites. I can't get German music in Canada, because I'm directed to the Canadian site, which doesn't sell German music. Same goes for amazon, netflix, and a whole list of others.
They may just have no rights to sell German music in Canada. Of course this should be independent from the UI language.
It sounds pretty dumb when I generalize it that way, but when I've actually run into it, it made perfect sense how the developers got where they did.
I think there it's technical particulars that lead to this scenario. For web, people don't like to choose their language or country manually. And also for web, there will be multiple different applications kind of strung together through APIs, etc. But the two pieces of information available to everyone is either browser language or geoIP/location. A lot of problems come from one app using browser language and another app using location. And even when you make a bad choice about which to use, it still works for 98%+ of users, so it can be a while until you get a complaint.
Yeah, I figured there was more to it. There are, of course, always is tradeoffs and existing constraints. Really helpful list, either way. 👌