[kartickv]

You didn't even understand what you're supposedly disagreeing with.

The locale settings need to be initialised to something, right? What default value would you choose? Miles for everyone, as Google Maps seems to? Km for everyone? Better than either of those is using location to set it to whatever the customary unit is in their country. Otherwise, you're doing the wrong thing for hundreds of millions of users.

Whether this particular setting is in the phone OS or in Google Maps is irrelevant. Either way, it needs to be initialised, and it should be initialised to something sane.

[jeroen94704]

The locale and language are system settings. My point is that applications and websites have no business second guessing those system settings based on location.

For the system-level settings, those are always part of the OS install process. So either an end-user building their own system, a commercial system builder or downstream provider like a phone company will have to set it to some value during installation. Location doesn't enter into it.

[kartickv]

Location can be used to update the default, on first run. There's no reason why that has to be the same for US and Indian users. That's the point I was making all along which you haven't understood.

Second, can you give me a reference to back up your claim that Android has an API that tells you whether the user prefers km or miles? We're not talking about language or locale here (things like en-IN) but distance units.