Third parties working on Arabic support for iPhone

Arabic iPhone Around the time of the iPhone’s release, we noticed that MobileSafari did not support viewing certain character sets: specifically Hebrew and Arabic. While one third-party group has been working on bringing Hebrew to the iPhone, we weren’t aware until more recently that people have also been working at compatibility from the Arabic angle.

Reader Khaled brought to our attention two separate groups, both working at bringing elements of Arabic language functionality to the iPhone. The first, at iPhone Islam, is aiming to bring Arabic character support to the iPhone via a downloadable application (you’ll apparently need Installer.app to do so). Unfortunately, my Arabic’s a little rusty from a couple years of disuse, so you’ll have to visit the site yourself if you want to figure out exactly what procedure you need to follow.

The second, more ambitious project, at iFone4Arab.com has as its goal producing a native Arabic interface for the entire iPhone. While they don’t yet have a working version available, you can check out screenshots at their website, or a YouTube video of the interface in action.

Pretty cool. We’re sure there will be official Apple Arabic at some point (presumably by the time the phone hits the Middle East), but in the interim, it might be worth checking out one or both of these if you’re in need of Arabic support on your iphone.

Category: News, Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Dec 21 2007, 11:53 AM ET

Comments (5)

Considering there's still no Arabic for iPhone, or an Arabic Tiger or Leopard (at least not a final, released, version), it's hard to see Apple bothering enough to Arabize the iPhone.

But progress of this and other Arabic issues concerning iPhone are often discussed on our site (http://www.emiratesmac.com).

Posted by EmiratesMac | December 21, 2007 12:58 PM

I would really hope this pushes Apple to embrace the Arabic speaking market. Hopefully as good as competitors like Microsoft and Nokia.

Posted by Khaled | December 22, 2007 8:17 AM

Apple's new represenative in Israel, iDigital, claim that they are translating OSX Leopard to Hebrew. An Arabic port can't be far behind.

...
Funny how we're always in the same boat on this issue.

Posted by Shay | December 22, 2007 11:23 AM

I guess apple have issues with RTL (right to left) languages...

Posted by khaled | December 24, 2007 1:42 AM

Hi,

The efforts of Ifone4arab are almost achieved the mission perfectly, he's made the iphone do both, read and write in Arabic perfectly in contrary to iPhone-Islam who toke another way to trick the system, while still struggling with the connecting characters problems.
The developer however has been silent all the time, there has never been any set date to release his version of Arabization.

What Apple has done in int Mac OS is that it enabled its systems to read Arabic website and doc, and also write in Arabic language. What apple has not done yet is to translate User Interface to be in Arabic. On the other hand, in the iPhone case, iPhone can neither read nor write in Arabic, which does not make sense when knowing that Apple does not lack the knowledge and the tech to Arabizing an OS.

Hopefully, in a soon upcoming update Apple will enable Arabic language, it least the reading ability!

Posted by Mohammad | January 1, 2008 10:09 PM

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