Detecting home country of Windows Phone 7

Question

Is there a way to programmatically find out what country a user's phone is from when my app is opened on their phone?

I have an app I'm developing that can use lbs/kg units and if someone's phone is from the United States, I want to enable lbs by default and if the phone is from anywhere else, I want to display kg by default. (note that I don't need think checking where they are connecting from would be accurate because it could be that they are travelling or using another country's proxy server).

Answer 1

You can't get the country, but you should be able to guess it from:

• the Locale of the device - see How to get "region & language" settings in WP7 via code?
• or from the TimeZone of the device - see TimeZoneInfo.Local - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timezoneinfo.local.aspx

Personally, I wouldn't worry about the travelling scenario - travelling Americans purchasing your app represents a very small percentage of your downloads.

Answer 2

You could also use the GPS to get their current position, then use the Bing API to get the country from the lat/long.

Using the GPS involves it's own headaches like adding a Privacy Policy, but from Stuart's answer, it seems like the most accurate way.