Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

Can anyone actually validate that this news is true?

I live in Hong Kong and have the latest iOS updates. I still have the Taiwanese flag... same for all my colleagues, both on personal and work phones.

That's important. It would be dismaying if this story spent an entire day at #1 on Hacker News and turned out not to be true.

It affects device models with “CN” or with “ZA” set as region:

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/05/taiwan-flag-emoji-disa...

It is also limited to just the keyboard and not enforced in 3rd party apps or websites:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...

How do you check this CN/ZA settings? I have an iPhone bought in HK, region set to “Hong Kong” (General -> Language & Region), iOS 13.1.2 and I see the Taiwanese flag in emojis. I test with the built in emoji keyboard in the “Notes” app.

Our phones are Taiwan models and we can reproduce it. Which iPhone do you have? If it still has the ZP region for Hong Kong instead of ZA region it will not be impacted. More here on it:

https://hiraku.tw/2019/10/4855/

I see, I just checked, mine has the ZP region (Hong Kong & Macau), so that would explain why I still have the Taiwanese flag.

I can't verify this part first hand, but they indicate in the article that before the 2018 model iPhone XS was released, the region code of Hong Kong was “ZP,” but it was changed to “ZA” after the newer model iPhone XS was released.

So users with newer devices would be impacted.

I am from Hong Kong, I can confirm that Taiwanese flag is not displayed in original Emoji keyboard (still appear in third-party keyboard like kaiboard). I am using HK region apple id and latest ios version

I managed to find a colleague with a newer iPhone, with ZA in the model, and Hong Kong as Region. The flag appears when language is set to English but disappears when language is set to Traditional Chinese (Cantonese). The conditions to have the flag disappear are not that widespread though, but the news is indeed real :-)

Also I can confirm. Friend of mine was in China and bought iPhone XR dual sim. And now lives at hometown – Moscow, Russia. Russian interface, Russian region is installed. But Taiwan flag is completely missing: in chats, web and keyboard.