I don’t expect most iPhone users to ever change their default settings, but it’s nice that it will be possible in a year.
Who knows, maybe one day you can run actual Firefox on them too? :p
An European iPhone, aka an iPhone which will get these features, is identified by a background process named countryd, introduced in iOS 16. Its only purpose is to compute and predict the most likely location of the user (as in country/region) and lock down features accordingly.
These are only some of the factors taken into the equation:
- GPS location
- Wi-Fi location
- Wi-Fi hotspot country codes
- Cellular/GSM country codes
- IP address
- Home and roaming operator regions
- Apple Account region
- Device region
- Satellite reachability
countryd takes in all of these and more as input to provide the most likely country of the user. If that country is in the EU, then 💥 Sideloading, Default Apps, etc etc etc goodies
This is disgusting.
It would have been easier to just remove these restrictions for everyone.
It’s funny, because I’ve worked on and off in regulation for some of these companies. Leadership always wants a “scalable regulatory solution” and the answer is always “let’s be more open” and leadership is always like “no”
It’s actually not hard to be compliant with the laws of 220+ regions. It’s just being on the edge of each and every restriction is more profitable.
I was in Corfu last week when the news of the Epic store came about, so tried to install it on my UK registered iPhone. All I got was a notification telling me that my phone isn’t eligible.
So yeah, no Fortnite in my phone for me. Not that I really care about that, I just like fiddling with shit.
IOW, not something that one stuck in Ameristan can realistically override. Damn.
A handful of those factors are fairly trivial, but addressing all of them concurrently sounds like a tall order - especially since presumably one can’t talk to countryd directly and feed it the desired data.
Appreciate the clarity - iOS just isn’t a platform I have a need or the tools to code in.
I tried fooling it myself several times with the aim of getting satellite connectivity in my unsupported country, to no avail.
Used a German SIM card (where this feature is supported), went in my basement where there’s no cell service so that it can’t read MNC or MCC from any networks nor can it read GPS precisely (the circle spanned almost all of Western Europe, that imprecise I mean), used a Raspberry Pi as a router with country code as DE, disabled Wi-Fi, used VPN, used the Xcode debugging tools to simulate iPhone location to Germany (this usually fools all apps into thinking I’m in Germany, including Apple’s own Find My), all to no avail. And there’s no way to feed countryd any custom data.
It’s insane.
