New hits from Apple – iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus – by default support the majority of new TLDs, including the ones that were launched a few days ago. When users enter a name in a new domain zone on devices of previous generations, they are redirected to a search page. iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus successfully recognize new domains. It’s not the devices themselves; it’s the new operating system iOS 8. It was announced together with the phones and is now available for download all over the world. After the installation new domains are successfully recognized by any other Apple mobile devices, starting with iPhone 4s.
Taking into account enormous popularity of Apple products, this step should be considered very important for the success of the whole new gTLD program. It should be noted that for now iOS 8 only supports domains in English or rather written with Latin characters. We want to believe that the next step will be support of internationalized domains as well.
In the opinion of Andrei Kolesnikov, CEO at Coordination Center for TLD RU, Apple is interested in the proper operation of new domains: “Apple applied for several gTLDs, including domain .APPLE, thus, it’s employees are interested that resources based on new domains work properly. Unfortunately, Apple is not that motivated to support domains in different languages, in contrast, for example with Google, which owns several IDN-zones.”
