Why can't I select what measurement units I want on my iPhone?

Agreed! Settings need: +Launguage +Mesuarement Units +Date Format +Currency, then maybe +Region. Give us choice on the rest! Same with keyboard choices like t9, or swype. Seriously a submenu just to enter proper punctuation in a message?

It's even worse for those of us in the US that use 'British English', and want to use all metric. If I switch my iphone to UK 'Region Format' many of my apps think I'm in the UK and won't work when first installed. I have to uninstall them, switch from UK region to US region under settings before installing a new app then I have to switch it back to UK region again afterwards. Even then, I'm still stuck with miles on Apple maps when I just want kilomtres. Nor are they enforcing apps to simply monitor the date format selected by the user region as the default for the app. So instead apps do their own thing entirely anyway. Often with some US bastardized monthdayyear hodgepodge of confusion.

Apple will not allow the MacBookPro, a $2,000 computer, to display date on the top bar as day month year. Even after making the date format changes under preferrences. Profesionally many of us in the US are constantly crimped by others in the US that for shortsighted reasons won't let the rest of us switch already. In the GIS field we have datasets collected by differenet tiers of government in countless formats that use feet, internation feet, and metres. It is a mess and no one seems to have the gumption and authority to put a stop to it and officially switch us to metic once and for all. Obama wrote a letter in response to this question by saying he woudln't touch the issue. So we have no leadership on unit standardization at all in the entirety of the US. Talk about killing regulations. **** we can't even agree how long a sporting field should be, metres or feet.

The least apple should do is allow end users of its electronic devices to input & display data the way we want it.

Quite right, a pain in the butt. Here I am, having lived in Belgium for thirty-five years and Spain for eight, having been told donkeys year ago that I needn't pay too much attention to the Imperial nonsense we had to learn alongside the metric stuff, and still Apple forces me to look at distances in Maps in Miles. No way, Pedro, as Del Boy once said. And the worse thing is, iOS7 offers the option of KM in the settings panel for Maps, AND STILL I SEE MILES. Horrible!

Help!

Can't edit, so here's a reply to myself.

Looking through the discussions here, I found a number of threads that link the choice of miles or km display to the Regional settings under International. The general opinion seems to be that the selected units depend on the "standard" of the country/region selected and not on the settings for Maps itself, which is a fair enough explanation, even if the premise is bonkers.

Anyway, checking the Region settings, I saw that I had United Kingdom selected. Looking a bit further, however, I noticed that Wales was also included in the list. Well, "Cymru am byth," I thought and selected that instead (I was born in Wales).

Back in Maps, i did my directions calculation again and, lo and behold, the distance showed up in km.

Good old Wales.

Of course, my dates (month and day names) are now in Welsh, but I can live with that.

Still waiting for a solution to this. I'm tired of Safari using my region settings for forwarding my serarches to google.co.uk and producing London results despite the fact I allow current location to be used, which is Portland Oregon. Please separate language, units, time format settings from eachother and most importantly from region as each should be a customizable item.

On a more philosophical level, how else is the majority of the US going to start using metric and standard international date format if not by granting us the choice to do so? People around the world wonder what is wrong with us. But if we don't even have a choice to change...

You can switch the units without having to switch the country or other regional settings.

On my iPhone I went to settings--maps --and checked "miles" under "Distances."

You can switch it as needed to km or miles whenever you want.

I Found a fix of sorts by selecting my location as Gibraltar. English language but metric units.

May I add my voice to the chorus asking Apple to please, just allow us to set which units we want. I live in the UK, but use metric. The usual work around to this is to set your region to somewhere else, so I set mine to Germany. And I've finally realised that this is why I couldn't use Apple Pay. For pity's sake! So I've set my region back to the UK, but I'm not going to suffer using antique measures in silence. Apple, add one little setting to the squillions of other settings, and save me from this madness! Please!

Hi,

I just selected British Virgin Islands as region and Siri now answers in km.