Where am I? - Get country

Question

An android mobile actually does know quite well where it is - but is there a way of retrieving the country by something like a country code?

No need of knowing the exact GPS position - the country is sufficient

I first thought of using the time zone, but actually I need more information than that since it makes a difference if the location is New York or Lima.

The background of the question: I have an application that uses temperature values, and I'd like to set the default unit either to Celsius or Fahrenheit, depending on whether the location is US or outside

Answer 1

First, get the LocationManager. Then, call LocationManager.getLastKnownPosition. Then, create a GeoCoder and call GeoCoder.getFromLocation. Do this is a separate thread!! This will give you a list of Address objects. Call Address.getCountryName and you got it.

Keep in mind that the last known position can be a stale, so if the user just crossed the border, you may not know about it for a while.

Answer 2

You could use getNetworkCountryIso() from TelephonyManager to get the country the phone is currently in (although apparently this is unreliable on CDMA networks).

Answer 3

This will get the country code:

 String locale = context.getResources().getConfiguration().locale.getCountry(); 

can also replace getCountry() with getISO3Country() to get a 3 letter ISO code for the country. This will get the country name:

 String locale = context.getResources().getConfiguration().locale.getDisplayCountry();

This seems easier than the other methods and rely upon the localisation settings on the phone, so if a US user is abroad they probably still want Fahrenheit and this will work :)

Answer 4

Actually I just found out that there is even one more way of getting a country code, using the getSimCountryIso() method of TelephoneManager:

TelephonyManager tm = (TelephonyManager)getSystemService(Context.TELEPHONY_SERVICE);
String countryCode = tm.getSimCountryIso();

Since it is the sim code it also should not change when traveling to other countries.