Enhance your app’s multilingual experience

iOS 26 Feature Overview

• Users can now type arabic words in latin script, the keyboard transliterates automatically

• Transliteration keyboard now also offers bilingual suggestions for 10 languages, enter English & translate

• New multi-script bilingual like for typing in Arabic or English

• New Thai keyboard with 24-key layout, way better for Thai speakers

Best Practices (Reminder)

• TextKit 2 makes it easy to support multiple languages, handles scripts like Korean/Hindi, more control

• Formatters help display dates, numbers, and text in an auto-adapting way (currency, date formats, etc.)

• Use inputAccessoryView to place input above keyboard, setTextInputContextIdentifier to remember language/layout

Language discovery

• Siri proactively suggests to setup device in multiple languages using on-device intelligence

• Content recommendations are done (additionally) in other language than UI is set to

• The existing Locale.preferredLanguages is now extended by Locale.prferredLocales to get more language info

• You get fields like .languageCode, .script, .calendar, .firstDayOfWeek, .timeZone, .currency, .region

• Locale.preferredLanguages may get deprecated, so migrate to preferredLocales

• When offering list of languages, for example, put all matching preferred locales at the top

• Use .isEquivalent or .hasCommonParent based on your needs for language matching

Alternate calendars

• New alternate calendar options for languages like Gujarati, Marati, and Korean

• Existing 16 calendar identifiers are extended by 11 more

Bidirectional text

• See also: Get it right to left

• Bidirectional text is when left-to-right and right-to-left language words are combined in one text

• This has significant implications for text selection

• Characters are always stored in the order they are written, only display varys

• When selecting bidirectional text, the cursor used to “jump”, creating a confusing experience

• New in iOS 26, selection in UI is now intuitive, the storage is adjusted accordingly

Selection prior to iOS 26Natural Selection in iOS 26

• To adopt this, instead of a single selected range, an array of selected ranges is required

• On macOS, this was already possible – NSTextView had selectedRanges

• But on iOS, UITextView had only selectedRange which will be deprecated in favor of selectedRanges

• Learn more: Codealong Cook up a rich text experience in SwiftUI with AttributedString

• New versions of edit menu UITextViewDelegate and UITextFieldDelegate methods available

• Use TextKit 2 to utilize textView.textLayoutManager (instead of textView.layoutManager)

• Writing direction used to be different from text direction in bidirectional text, leading to cursor “stay in place”

• This year, when switching from LTR to RTL, the cursor moves naturally considering it to be an LTR sentence

• Writing direction will now be dynamically determined for whole sentence based on text content

• If you use your custom texte engine, refer to the Language Introspector sample code