Get device location (only country) in iOS

Question

I need to get the country location of a iOS device.

I've been trying to use CoreLocation with MKReverseGeocoder. However this seems to return erraneous quite frequently. And I only need the country, no need for streets and such.

How can this be done in a more stable way?

Answer 1

NSString *countryCode = [[NSLocale currentLocale] objectForKey: NSLocaleCountryCode]; 

will get you an identifier like e.g. "US" (United States), "ES" (Spain), etc.

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In Swift 3:

let countryCode = NSLocale.current.regionCode 

In Swift 2.2:

let countryCode = NSLocale.currentLocale().objectForKey(NSLocaleCountryCode) as String 

Compared to a solution based on CLLocationManager this approach has pros and cons. The primary con is that it doesn't guarantee that this is where the device is physically if the user configures it differently. This can however also be seen as a pro since it instead shows which country a user is mentally/culturally aligned with - so if e.g. I go abroad on vacation then the locale is still set to my home country. However a pretty big pro is that this API doesn't require user permission like CLLocationManager does. So if you haven't already gotten permission to use the user's location, and you can't really justify throwing a popup dialog in the user's face (or they already rejected that popup and you need a fallback) then this is probably the API you want to use. Some typical use cases for this could be personalization (e.g. culturally relevant content, default formats, etc.) and analytics.

Answer 2

NSLocale is just a setting about currently used regional settings, it doesn't mean the actual country you're in.

Use CLLocationManager to get current location & CLGeocoder to perform reverse-geocoding. You can get country name from there.