As noted by Horace Dediu, Apple has published an official list of iOS 6 feature availability on its website. While iOS 6 is officially coming out next week, on September 19th, not every feature will be available in every country.
The list focuses mainly on Siri, Maps, and Dictation. Availability of iTunes Store and App Store content is mentioned as well, but that’s not really new if you’ve been following the expansion of Apple’s digital storefronts in the past months. What’s interesting ahead of iOS 6’s launch is the list of features that, due to content limitations or the “beta” nature of Siri, won’t be available in some parts of the world.
For instance, Maps’ “standard” operation will be available from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe for a total of 181 supported countries. This should include the “standard” view of Maps – the new tiles that Apple is using after removing Google’s ones from iOS 6 entirely. Similarly, the Satellite view of Maps will be available in the same 181 countries worldwide. However, things start getting different with Maps’ Directions and and Turn-by-Turn navigation: the former will be available in 96 countries, the latter in 56. 3D buildings, another feature of Maps, will only be available in the United States at launch, whereas Traffic information will be available in 23 countries. Last, Maps Local Search will be available in 49 countries, and Business Reviews and Photos in 15.
Siri is even more limited. In spite of the voice assistant gaining support for more languages in iOS 6, several functionalities and integrations will be limited by the user’s location. So, for instance, while everyone will be able to set Siri to a supported language and issue commands, Sports data will be limited to 15 countries; Twitter and Facebook integration to 14; Local Search and Restaurant Information to 10, but Restaurant Reviews will only be available through Siri in 9 countries and Reservations in 3 (USA, Canada, Mexico). Another Siri integration, Movies, will be limited to 13 countries for Movie Information, 4 for Reviews, and only 3 for showtimes.
As Apple embraces more third-party services in its operating systems, it’s no surprise that some features will be restricted to only the countries where those services are fully operational. The same happened with the first version of Siri last year – some commands were only supported in the United States initially.
Check out the full list of iOS 6 feature availability here.
