This is a real problem for 'internationally oriented' people. I don't do MS/Xbox, so cannot speak to that, but I do Android/Google, iOS/Apple, and Kindle/Amazon.
I have been living multinationally for the past several years and it is a serious hindrance on all three of these 'ecosystems'.
Apple seems the easiest to work with as long as you maintain an account and a credit card in every country you want to deal with. Their devices all support multiple accounts, albeit with significant inconvenience, and they do not disable features based on your geographical location.
Amazon is not as good, but I only use them for Kindle so it doesn't faze me as much and I just deal with having a US account.
Google is the worst of these three in my experience, because their digital restrictions and feature-disabling systems are mainly based on physical geographic location (which they sometimes get wrong), not the location of the linked credit card. This means, for instance, that I can buy a Google phone in San Francisco and not even be able to look up my order the next week when I am back in Tokyo. (The product isn't available here so you can't even see it--even in the purchase history section when logged into the account.)
All of these systems are horribly flawed from the multinational customer's perspective. But essentially, big corporate doesn't really give two shits about the minute percentage of users that live/work in more than one country, so I doubt this problem will get better.
In fact, I expect it to get worse as more companies copy Apple's platform-as-closed-monoculture concept (as e.g. Microsoft is doing).
I'm not based in the US and I find the situation is reversed.
I have an app (Market Access) for my Android phone that allows me to control what network gets reported to the Play store, so I can install apps from wherever - I just set it to T-mobile US and I'll get the US store.
When I had an iPhone, many apps weren't available locally. I had to buy a $10 gift card (purchased with a US credit card) from a dodgy site in the far east. I used that to set up a new Apple account, and ended up juggling stuff between the two accounts. The only way to add credit to the US account was via more (200% markup) gift cards. Apple chases after the gift card resellers, so locating a reliable supply is difficult. I ended up mostly downloading free apps from the US store.
Well, that sounds pretty cool, but I believe there are various DRM workarounds if you jailbreak an iOS device, too. (Market Access requires you to root your phone, right?)
I was mostly speaking to the way these markets and devices are intended to operate. Basically they all suck, but the implementation details may make one less of a pain in the ass than another, for a given situation. In Apple's case, I think they are the most convenient if you already have a credit card in every country you care about purchasing from.
Actually there are no DRM workarounds (short of pirating the apps) if you jailbreak an iOS device. MarketAccess allows you to legally purchase the apps.
Your original point about Google's geographically restrictions is technically wrong. It's not based on your geolocation but on the simcard inside the phone. If have a simcard from the USA then putting it inside an Android phone gives you access to the USA store even while in Thailand—you can still download over WiFi.
Moreover Android's system solves the problem stated in the original article i.e. move to a new country and Google switches over to that country's store. Move to another and Google switches again. All your apps already downloaded continue to work. All apps purchased can be redownloaded if they aren't restricted in the new country. There is no need to have separate Google Play accounts for different countries or merge accounts.
I have one Google Play account. I have four iTunes accounts (USA, Canada, UK and Japan). Android gets it right imo.
> Your original point about Google's geographically restrictions is technically wrong. It's not based on your geolocation but on the simcard inside the phone. If have a simcard from the USA then putting it inside an Android phone gives you access to the USA store even while in Thailand—you can still download over WiFi.
It's both. For apps in the Play Store it is generally SIM-based, but for "content" (i.e. Music, Movies & TV, Books, Magazines) there's a geographic block on the stores in addition to the SIM check. Even with that, Music and Books are semi-sane (you can use them wherever after purchase). Movies & TV, OTOH, is batshit crazy. Even after buying something you can't stream it or download it if you fail either the SIM check or the geographic check. Even playing things you've already downloaded can be an issue.
On top of that, you have devices without SIMs (e.g. tablets) which have a geographic check on everything, including apps. And then there are the corner cases...
P.S. These days even previously-purchased / downloaded apps can be re-downloaded even when restricted in a country because they still show up in your purchase history.
Hmm, thanks for the tip about about the SIM card; I was excited to read that, as I happened to have a US SIM card in my bag (here in Tokyo).
But, after replacing the Docomo SIM with the US SimpleMobile SIM and rebooting, while I do indeed get some variant of the US store, I still can't access various things I've purchased or that I would be able to access from within the USA (movies, magazines) presumably because I am physically located in Japan, and those items aren't available here.
So they are doing something with the SIM card, clearly--putting in the US card changes my Play store to some lobotomized version of the US store with whole sections missing. But they are also somehow using my physical location to restrict my account block my access to things I have purchased in the USA.
With Apple's credit card-based authorization, this does not happen.
Either way sucks, but for me personally Apple's way is a lot better, because things don't stop working when I physically move. (They would instead stop working if I had to cancel all my credit cards in one country, though.)
I don't do MS/Xbox, so cannot speak to that, but I do Android/Google, iOS/Apple, and Kindle/Amazon.
I got a Kindle as a birthday gift from my better half. In advance, I had told family members that I was getting a Kindle one way or the other, so I asked them to please don't buy me physical books. "Please give me giftcards for Amazon instead".
Fair enough. So said. So they did. And that was when I was in for a surprise.
You cannot get a UK-model Kindle outside the UK, so my better half had ordered a US-model.
Normally, when buying from Amazon, I have always in the past ordered books from amazon.co.uk, because they are geographically closer to me here in Europe and it just feels more natural. And seemingly so had a few of the giftcard-buyers thought as well.
Imagine my surprise when I find out I cannot redeem my UK giftcard-code in the US-store and that I cannot order Kindle-books for my US-kindle in the UK-store where I was forced to redeem my code.
In the end I had to buy physical books after all.
Granted: Amazon is by far one of the better players in the field. But because of that, this leaking out of internal business processes onto me, their customer, took me by great surprise.
Nah you can do it as many times as you want and the books are in the same listing on your kindle regardless. You have to switch your "account" while actually buying the books.
I had the exact same thing happen in Canada. Asked for Amazon gift cards for the Kindle I just got for Christmas. Got hundreds of dollars worth. None of it usable for my actual Kindle because they were "Canadian" Amazon not "US" Amazon gift cards.
After being very confused, I was very disappointed.
I'm less than 100% certain, but I think this is accounting/tax law at work. The UK entity sold you a gift card. The liability for that is on their books. They can't just move that number over to the US entity. They're separate. That explains the gift cards, the Kindle thing is either contracts with publishers or something else, but something they probably could solve.
Even though we are a tiny fraction the size of Netflix, it seems a good time to mention that at MUBI we try our best to do the right thing. That is, if you subscribe to MUBI in one country, you can use that subscription in any other country. This is non-trivial because film rights are highly localized and we have different films available around the world, but we have at least a few hundred in every single country. But it gives you the advantage that you can travel and see new films that wouldn't otherwise be available.
It definitely does get thorny around integrations (PS3/PSN billing), but it's something we actively think about.
Actually it doesn't let you use MUBI with a PSN account registered to a different country than the one you are currently in (it must use IP checks I presume). You need to register a new PSN account for every country.
Right, well that's why I mentioned it. This is an impedance mismatch between our systems. PSN billing is based on account affiliation, MUBI geofiltering based purely on IP.
I'm not sure if they verify that you are in the UK when you create a UK PSN account or if it just requires a UK credit card, but at any rate, once you have it, you can use it anywhere in the world. This conflicts directly with MUBI's licensing rights where we have different film rights in each country and can only stream certain films with certain subtitles in different countries. Because we are integrated with PSN billing and we have a PPV option this makes it impossible to support a foreign account because the user would be paying the wrong amount, in the wrong currency, and this would not meet our agreements with rightsholders. This is just one of many thorny issues (don't get me started on sub-regions like Isle of Man which have the same PSN store despite different ISO country). Technically the gap could be bridged, but the sheer weight of the logic in the code and also for our accountants to sort out is not justifiable.
However, the essence of our service is that if you buy a subscription from us you can use it anywhere in the world. Currently for PS3 that means you have to buy it from us and not from Sony, and also you do have to contact us to re-affiliate your MUBI account with a different PSN account if you move. We have plans to improve that so you can have multiple PSN accounts affiliated with a single MUBI account though that itself is also a significant engineering initiative that has not made it to the top of the priority list yet. As imperfect a solution as that is, once set up it will actually work even for people who regularly move between multiple countries, and I believe we are ahead of any premium content streaming company in that regard.
Great! I know for a fact that Netflix does this, so it's good to see you guys are inheriting the better parts of Netflix ;). I have a Canadian Netflix account, which while in Canada can only access licensed Canadian content, but while in the States I have access to the whole gamut of goodies that are available here and not back at home.
> Apple seems the easiest to work with as long as you maintain an account and a credit card in every country you want to deal with.
Why not deal with one country only? I have been using my German Apple ID quite happily on three continents. I may miss out on some movies, music and especially iBooks, but there are plenty of other sources. The only hard downside is that some local apps are limited to the respective App Store, e.g. the Australian Optus Mobile (carrier) app.
I think Apple's account system is needlessly complicated, but what problems are there if you stick to one account?
Yes, that is what makes Apple's way superior to Google's; your valid account from one country doesn't stop working when you go to another country.
But there are still reasons to use two accounts. In Japan there are apps which are only available in the Japanese app store (although I cannot understand why). For example, I use some navigation apps and my wife uses some cooking apps that are only available in Japan.
Developers can select the country app stores their apps are available in. It wasn't relevant for my app but if an app can't really be used in the other country why risk support requests and bad reviews when you might actually want to launch a functional version there one day.
Why? To use the examples of the grandparent comment: there are always overseas Japanese who want to cook, or tourists who want to use a local navigation app. I can only come up with legal reasons, or bandwidth preservation maybe.
If you meant Google a/c attached to an Android device then I would like to differ. I created an account in Korea and used it extensively in India and it also worked well in USA. And yes, on all the three places more than one device was used with the account, over the time.
There's my friend who bought his iPad in Holland and he is in India now but the language of his iPad app store is still Dutch. He says he can change it but that comes with some trouble he is not willing to go through.
There are country specific apps on almost all the app ecosystems.
Yeah, Apple and iTunes are no trouble at all if you can maintain a valid payment method in one country. Amazon is very similar, I think. I've had no trouble buying digital media with a US account while living in Europe.
Almost everyone else uses geocoding to enforce your location, which is infuriating. I really don't understand why, if I have a completely valid US credit card and billing address, you refuse to sell me things that are available in the US. If Amazon.com will sell me downloadable games without complaint, why is Steam so stringent about checking my current location?
Amazon and Steam work the same for me in Canada/Latin America - have to use a local card. That said, I've still been able to make some purchases without switching. I've long given trying to understand the nuances of it.
I've moved my Apple account between 3 countries now - while I can't update some apps through iTunes, the updates are always available on the devices themselves, and if I try to buy an app purchased in another country, it downloads it without any hassle.
The Mac App store is a bit different - you cannot redownload apps purchased on another country (so when I reinstalled Mac OS and needed to install iPhoto, I had to revert my account to the previous country).
> I've moved my Apple account between 3 countries now - while I can't update some apps through iTunes, the updates are always available on the devices themselves
How did you set this up? For me to download an app from another country, I need to log out of my current store and log into the other one. It's annoying, and causes problems.
> The Mac App store is a bit different - you cannot redownload apps purchased on another country (so when I reinstalled Mac OS and needed to install iPhoto, I had to revert my account to the previous country).
That's how it works on iOS. You just need to log into the other account. That it's on a desktop just makes it easier.
I have been living multinationally for the past several years and it is a serious hindrance on all three of these 'ecosystems'.
Apple seems the easiest to work with as long as you maintain an account and a credit card in every country you want to deal with. Their devices all support multiple accounts, albeit with significant inconvenience, and they do not disable features based on your geographical location.
Amazon is not as good, but I only use them for Kindle so it doesn't faze me as much and I just deal with having a US account.
Google is the worst of these three in my experience, because their digital restrictions and feature-disabling systems are mainly based on physical geographic location (which they sometimes get wrong), not the location of the linked credit card. This means, for instance, that I can buy a Google phone in San Francisco and not even be able to look up my order the next week when I am back in Tokyo. (The product isn't available here so you can't even see it--even in the purchase history section when logged into the account.)
All of these systems are horribly flawed from the multinational customer's perspective. But essentially, big corporate doesn't really give two shits about the minute percentage of users that live/work in more than one country, so I doubt this problem will get better.
In fact, I expect it to get worse as more companies copy Apple's platform-as-closed-monoculture concept (as e.g. Microsoft is doing).