Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems like a better response would be to add a bunch of other "not real country" flags. Flags from ancient civilizations, or countries that no longer exist. Then they wouldn't be taking a stand as the people responsible for defining what is and is not a country.

You know who's not stupid? The Chinese Communist Party is not stupid.

That's not how it works in China. Plausible deniability, benefit of the doubt, etc, is not in the CCP's vocabulary.

I'm less worried about China than the precedent they're setting. I think, perhaps, if they'd done something like this a while ago, it might have taken China that much longer to care.

There are (generally) very few "solutions" in these things, so it's best to focus on small gains, cracks that things slip through, and temporary safe spaces.

> add a bunch of other "not real country" flags.

I’d prefer that they altered the flags of despotic countries in some way that indicated their inferior ruling system.

I can't tell if you're serious, but if you are: which entity should be responsible for categorizing countries into "despotic" and "not despotic"?

That would not actually work due to how unicode works. There really is not a code point for Taiwanese flag, or Russian flag, or American flag. In fact, each flag is made of two code points, making up the ISO code for the country. So, for Taiwan, the flag is made of code point "flag T" and "flag W". And yes, this means that to correctly render unicode, you need to know the current geopolitical situation in the world (fun, right?)

This also means that you cannot easily add non-existent countries. They do not have country codes

Millions of CCP members are not stupid but the CCP as an organization is extremely stupid. That's part of the horror of it.

I’m not being serious.

Apple is tying itself in knots trying to tread a line here, and it just makes them look pathetic. They seem to want to be seen as a shining light in terms of human progress and human rights, but that ends as soon as they hit their Chinese market.

This is an extremely quality response. Thank you for the info.