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by roussanoff 2011 days ago
I actually have the opposite take. The use of "X" instead of «X» in Russia started with the typewriters, not the computers. Apple added the correct quotation marks in iOS 11, and you could see how people very quickly switched to using them on social media. The software helped people rediscover the correct symbols and drop the typewriter-era bad habits, all it took was a small software upgrade.
1 comments

On iOS, " is automatically auto corrected to « for me.

Are people switching voluntarily or because it is the new default?

If you are using the Russian keyboard, it's the new default (since iOS 11). Before that, you had to long-press the " to get it (along with ˝, „ and all these other marks.

Interestingly, the computer keyboards are stuck with the old layouts. You can't buy a Russian keyboard with the right quotation marks. I am using a custom layout by Ilya Birman [1] that makes a nice remapping with «» available quickly.

[1] https://ilyabirman.ru/projects/typography-layout/