Android 16 is getting more personalized with new regional preference options

With billions of active users, Android is the world’s most popular mobile operating system. It offers built-in support for nearly every widely spoken language, making it usable regardless of a person’s location. To keep things simple, apps infer what region you’re in from the system language. This is fine for most people, but it can be problematic for international students, immigrants, temporary workers, or other people who want apps to show units relevant to their current region while keeping their phone in a language they better understand.

Fortunately, Google plans to decouple region from the system language preference in Android 16. This means you’ll be able to use your phone in your preferred language while still seeing dates, numbers, and measurements formatted for your actual location.

For example, if you’re an American studying abroad in a country like Japan, you may want to set your phone’s region to Japan so apps will automatically format dates, currency, temperatures, and more in the way they’re typically formatted in the country. Currently, you would have to set your phone’s language to Japanese to also set its region to Japan, or hope that every app offers its own built-in settings for unit personalization. Android 16 will allow you to set your phone’s language to English and the region to Japan independently.

The independent region setting isn’t live yet in Android 16 Beta 1. With a bit of tinkering, though, I managed to make it appear under Settings > System > Language & region. By doing so, I also activated the revamped “languages” page, which now has the “regional preferences” settings directly on the main page (they used to be in their own submenu). I also stumbled upon the new “measurements” page which will let you specify what measurement system you want apps to use. You can choose from the default measurement system tied to your region, the metric system, the imperial system as used in the US, and the imperial system as used in the UK.

The measurement system option builds on Android’s regional preferences feature, introduced in Android 14. The regional preferences feature provides a single place for you to personalize the display of dates, temperatures, numbers, and other units. Before regional preferences, apps typically inferred your region from the system language and used that to determine the display of these units. While some apps offered unit customization, many did not, leaving you stuck with the app’s defaults.

The new “region” menu should also solve the problem of limited unit customization. Because you can now set your preferred region independently of the system language, apps will display units in your region’s preferred format, even units not customizable system-wide. This includes units in apps like Pixel Weather. Previously, you had to change their system language to achieve this. For example, if your device language is English but your region is Germany, weather apps should display wind speed in km/h, not mph.

Satisfying the regional preferences of Android’s diverse user base is a challenge. Google’s ongoing efforts to improve Android’s regional preferences feature show its commitment to making the OS more customizable and accessible. These improvements will be particularly welcome to immigrants and other international users. Hopefully, these changes will be included in the stable Android 16 release, and developers will quickly adopt the new APIs.