Hi,
I’m puzzled about the system settings Date and time:
There is “Time format” where ”Use Locale Default” is available, but what is my locale? How do I find it and set it? Unless I overlooked it, there is no setting “Locale”.
That same settings screen shows Date: 20 April 2023, which is what I want, but on the home screen I get “Thursday, Apr 20” which is not what I want (I want Thursday, 20 April).
So…?
So you use a FP4 and which system in which Version?
Edit: so irrespective of device and System;
In German this says ( and works like this): use the standard for the selected language setting. So this is connected to the system language you set, else there is nothing to select or do.
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Interesting.
My language is set to English UK, then French and then Dutch.
Sigh.
I would just like to never get “April 20” but prefer “20 April”.
Why can’t I get these formats independent of wherever I live or what language I prefer to work in?
Maybe that’s a bug, not related to the locale setting and I think not adjustable so better to contactsupport
Because Google apparently decided it was a good idea to remove this in Android 6 and not bring it back since despite user complaints … How to change date and time format on Marshmallow? - Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange
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Google decides what I like? This is then as bad as Apple, because in OS13 they took the independent settings away too. Luckily I found a way around that one, because all my documents with numbers in them would have gone bad. There are other people in similar situations. In my case I want the combination English+metric+24hclock+euros+apostrophe for digit grouping+ISO dates, etc. and there simply is no corresponding ”country”.
I can understand that there would be an easy-out way to set all formats in one go by selecting a “country”, but at least give the option of independent settings.
I don’t live “in a country”.
Sigh.
Neither Google nor Apple nor anyone should be allowed to compartmentalise the population of the planet. We should be way past that.
I presume my locale is the one corresponding to the first language choice.
The formats must be stored in some list, and it must be possible to change that list or add to it. Anyone know of an app that does it?
Welcome to the desert of the real.
I think it’s not so much a question of an App. As what you seek is in the system and as a user you can’t access this by default, you (or an App for that matter) would need access as root to change anything. That’s at least possible to do, the forum search should have something.
And then indeed you would need to know where to change what exactly. Lacking more precise pointers for now, it would start here somewhere, I guess … https://source.android.com/
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What are you using to get the date on the home screen? My digital clock widget shows ‘Thu 20 Apr’ and I use Nova Launcher rather than the default.
However I am using a Beta 13 on an FP3
Amoun:
No idea. It is just there.
AnotherElk:
Yes, of course, and with a lot of time and effort I could start from the source etc. etc., but I was sort of hoping someone might have written an app similar to what TinkerTool for MacOS does: letting the user change settings that exist but are not accessible through the normal interface.
The last thing I want to do is mess with the system, install a different OS, and all those other things that just soak up my time and need to be kept up to date at the cost of yet more time.
I’d like those who write the systems to understand that there exist users with needs between those of the average consumer and those of the source code geek.
I just spent two weeks getting macOS 13.x to do what was simple and easy a few years ago, but that Apple has decided is now either “useless” or forbidden. I could write a very long rant about it. Now I find it is perhaps quite similar with Android.
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That happens when the main language is “English”: You’re supposed to have an UK/US locale. It’s not specifically Android’s fault, it’s a more general OS/Linux thing.
Except that in Linux you can go and manually set (for instance) “%d/%m/%y, %H:%M” as date/time format, even as a humble user, while Android is dumbed down like iOS and doesn’t allow you to worry your little head, if you’re using English as language you must be English, so you’ll automatically get what UK/US consider as proper formats. 
(I have the exact same issue, just replace “Dutch” with “German”…)
Hi KurtF:
Yeah, exactly.
Similar issue, but on the web: because I happen to live in France, it is sometimes impossible to get certain web pages (e.g. payments) in anything other than French. I have no trouble at all with the language, but it is annoying. Another annoying one is
”We see you are in France, would you like to continue in French?”
Another extra click…
Sometimes it is even totally impossible: when I buy Cinema4D (Maxon, in Germany) I am obliged to go to the French shop. Same price, and in euros, but no way out.
Yet another one was when we wanted to watch “Back to the Future 3” which we did not have on DVD. Downloaded, and fortunately could choose ”version originale” for audio, so we could listen to it in Englsih, but impossible to get English subtitles!
Apple’s music store does not allow me to buy any songs in Dutch: I need a credit card in Holland for that.
Etc.
And it will get much worse over this year, because AI is creeping up on us, ever faster. To get to the mountains of AI, we will first have to cross the Great Desert of the half-witted applications.
Good luck.
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Nah, nothing to do with AI, it’s just the general dumbing-down marketing considers to be necessary to “optimize revenue”.
Eventually everything will be reduced to just a big, fancy, colorful button saying “Pay me!”, and that’s all. 
(And the worst thing is, some people will love that! No more need to think, at last!..)
Oh well, this is going out-of-topic at warp factor 5, isn’t it… 
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Under Languages I can set English to be UK or US it looks like you may have English US
It does not change anything on the FP4 whatever you pick it is Friday, Apr 21 on the home screen.
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KurtF:
Warp factor 6, Mr. Sulu. Never heard 5.
But agreed.
amoun:
No, I have - always had - UK.
Yvonne:
Yes, however, I need to be able to change it, it drives me nuts.
OK, let’s forget it for a while.
Sigh.
Yeah, indeed. I must have heard 3 in the original series (watched them in the 1960s).
We have all 748 episodes on DVD, and when my wife found out we had not strictly followed the chronology, we had to watch them all again! A long story, and off-topic indeed.
Live long and prosper!
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Surely we are not limited to US or UK locales for English? Good phone brands like Samsung support the IE locale but often cheaper brands remove locales from android before shipping it. If my phone arrives without IE it’s going straight back.
But US or UK or IE is not the problem.
The parallel, on a different system, is this:
On MacOS before version 13.x, there was this settings panel:
As you can see, on that system I have set my languages to EnglishUK, French and Dutch, in that order. In the region I chose France, because that immediately filled in metric, 24h, Celsius, and euros (€). But I still had to set the number and date and time formats by clicking the button “Advanced…”. That led to the panels:
There it was possible to set the number formats for normal numbers and for currency if desired. There were two other tabs on that panel:
Then, for some reason, time zone was in another panel yet:
with also
(Note also that there is a “bug” in that my preferred date formats are not followed in the Date&Time panel.)
Finally, my closest city is Geneva.
THERE IS NO COUNTRY THAT GIVES THESE SETTINGS.
Great, but someone in Cupertino decided that the advanced panels were not necessary and removed them. I communicate with many people in different parts of the world, and the only non-ambiguous format for numbers is the Swiss one. Numbers in this format are in thousands of my documents and I can no longer set that format. Fortunately there is a little utility called TinkerTool that allows me to set it by gui:
That is possible because Apple’s interface “designer” who removed the panel did not realise that underneath, the system still looks at some preference file which is still there. But for how long.
The existence of TinkerTool made me think that perhaps for Android some angel somewhere would have made a similar app.
The problem therefore lies with people with no experience making decisions from somewhere in the middle of some “country” and thinking it’s all solved.
When the COVID lockdown happened, the rules for crossing borders around here were decided in Paris (which I don’t think is really connected to the rest of France anyway) and in Bern (which is in the middle of Switzerland). As a result, my wife could not get her medecine: our doctors are mostly “downtown” in Geneva, and the special medecine was, for some reason, not available in the EU, so we had to cross the border to get it. Fortunately again, CERN realised this very well, intervened with the Swiss and with the prescription we could cross the border.
Anyone living near the Northern Ireland border, or in Basel, Strassbourg or Luxembourg knows all this very well.
In the meantime I will have to live with Saturday, Apr. 22.
Have a good WE,
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