I noticed that the places Arc gets from Google come in different languages. My phone is configured in Portuguese, but some place names, presumably the ones without a Portuguese translation, are returned in English. Usually this would not be a problem, but I noticed that some days get some interesting statistics:
I’m not sure if there is something you can do to solve this. Does the Google lookup API have a language option? Perhaps getting the places always in the local (as in the original place location) language? Internationalization/localization is a very complicated issue…
@lmpinto To the direct question: yes, the lookup takes a language, and the app already sends your phone’s language on every request. So that setting isn’t what’s producing the split you’re seeing.
The split in the year stats is a separate thing. The city grouping there doesn’t come from the Google lookup at all — it comes from a separate reverse-geocode of each place’s coordinates, done when the place is created, and nothing in the language settings reaches it. No setting today changes it.
Oh my small add here (that Claude’s already touched on): Those ones actually come from Apple rather than Google. Apple’s reverse geocode service.
And Apple’s service is… not great on data completeness and correctness. But then frustratingly neither is Google’s when it comes to well curated data labelling. Google’s maps and places databases are the most comprehensive of all, but are still often poorly curated in naming consistency etc.
So moving these reverse geocode lookups to Google isn’t a clear win. (I’m going on a product/implementation tangent of thought there). Oh and Google’s is absurdly expensive while Apple’s is free. So it’d be a switch over for extortionate cost but no certainty that the data would be any better.
But in this particular case it does look like more of a technical failing rather than data quality. Like Apple’s reverse geocode service messed up the localisation for some requests. I wonder if it was a temporary glitch.
The trick there then would be in how to get them reset and retried. Hmm.
