alt Hacker Newsafter Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard
I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?
In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"
Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone security for law enforcement and the like, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do it (at any price) unless you could somehow trick them into thinking you had some "interesting" data on there...
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The team is even larger if you consider that any past member counts - you only need to think about it once and add a test
Honestly of the big companies sometimes I feel like Apple is the worse offender in i18n questions
Sure they have most of their stuff translated but some rough edges make me feel they do the bare minimum:
- Their ISO keyboard sucks. Sure their overall quality makes it good but of the major brands their Enter key is the most flimsy attempt at it
- Some long standing bugs https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250299816?sortBy=rank (which I had the impressions they were made worse in localized version or at least if you used a non American date format)
- General weirdness with translation missing sometimes
> Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?
I don't think we can assume the team is large.
Many people here are discussing a phase out. Just add an obscure key combo that won’t be triggered via normal use, and leave it there forever.
It’s wild that "verify existing passcodes remain inputtable" isn't the absolute first item on the QA checklist for any keyboard layout change. The Czech layout isn't exactly an obscure edge case.
The USB keyboard suggestion mentioned in the other comments likely won't work either because of USB Restricted Mode. After an hour of being locked, iOS disables data over the Lightning/USB-C port until the device is unlocked. It’s a perfect, recursive failure: you can't unlock the phone because the character is missing, and you can't plug in a hardware keyboard because the phone is locked.
Treating the passcode keyboard as a transient UI element that can be "cleaned up" rather than a hard security dependency is a massive architectural oversight. If the OS allows a character to be used in a passcode, that glyph needs to be permanently accessible in a fallback mode, no matter what the localization team decides to prune.