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Comment by sails01 | Hacker News Reader

Now it would be great if Apple allowed associating more than one country for my purchases to my apple id, i.e. based on having credit cards issued by banks in different countries. Seems that for Apple does not exist the concept of living between to countries (expats, dual citizens, etc)

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And other idiots that live in continent sized countries and don't realize that in Europe it's very easy to cross borders.

Sony, I'm looking at you...

Hey, did you know that Apple discovered that they can allow you to select multiple languages simultaneously for the spell checker? When? In iOS 18...

Like, for example, Belgium hasn't existed since iOS 1 (they use at least 3 languages currently there, as far as I know).

Belgian born and raised. I had 3 keyboards on my phone, all QWERTY (I can't stand AZERTY) but with different spell checks (Dutch, French & English)

When iOS 18 came out with this feature I turned it off, because it's not smart enough to infer context (at least when I used it, maybe it got better?), and messed up autocorrects.

I just use Romanian and English. Sometimes in the same phrase. Eventually it gave up and seemed to adapt enough to what i tend to type to not annoy me every time I send a message.

But then, that was the behaviour even before iOS 18 when I had two keyboards installed. It just took it longer to give up and accept both languages on both keyboards :)

Sony is a Japanese company and I've always thought of japan as a relatively small country. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Japan isn't that small (especially population wise) and besides when the playstation comes in the news there's an english sounding name attached to them.

Also even without the anglosphere management they're an island and crossing a border is ... complex ... for them :)

it's 4% the size of the US' land area. That's "small" to me.

"oh but genewitch the US is a huge country, you can't compare!"

i know. i wish people would remember that when discussing "policy."

edit: per the OP the EU is 50% the size of the US, in land area. So even put in that perspective, i don't consider Japan to be a "large" country. Yes, their population density is crazytown but "continent sized countries" japan is not a member of that set.

Nitpicking. It's an island. And either Sony Japan or their english speaking CEOs haven't noticed that the EU has disabled borders between all those tiny (or not so tiny to allow for more nitpicking) countries and it's customer hostile to have content restrictions based on those borders.

You probably don't even realize that PSN accounts are tied to countries and Sony does not allow changing country because of "regional rights". Or more because of laziness and/or incompetence, since 99% of titles are available worldwide anyway.

Wouldn't be much of a problem but they think they're some government and only allow paying them with cards based in the country's account... and of course with grey market prepaid cards from the right country, beause who's going to take that seriously?

Media (music, film, TV, app) content licenses are country specific. Apple is relatively good about providing global access to purchased content. Amazon alters the list of available titles based on client IP/VPN geolocation. Some streaming vendors entirely block client devices based on IP/VPN geolocation.

To nuance, the Kindle store is more open than any of the stores I know of. As long as the account is created on the right country store, Amazon won't care about a real address or the credit card's country and will allow for digital purchases of any content available.

Streaming goes through the Prime portal so it's more tricky, but getting access to foreign ebooks without trouble is to me a pretty big deal.

They also allow country changes with content retention.

It is a MASSIVE pain in the ass to go through this process.

Kobo/Rakuten doesn't care either FYI.

baby shark

I always keep two sets of Apple devices with separate accounts for this reason :(

Some apps are country specific. My banking app wasn't available in the USA app store, so that alone meant I had to keep a separate iPhone.

You can log out of your US account in App Store, login with your other country account, download the app, then log out and log back in to your US account.

It will maintain authentication for some time and let you update the app, but eventually it expires. Then you get the sketchiest dialog box ever randomly when doing anything on your phone:

“If you have an Apple ID, enter the password”

What it actually means to say is, “I know you have another Apple ID that’s not currently logged in as primary, and I’m trying to background update apps owned by that account but the authentication expired. Please enter the password for [other Apple ID].”

> What it actually means to say is..

Good use case for Apple Intelligence: pick the best customer-authored translation of incoherent error messages and display in an optional overlay.

Android/GrapheneOS allows multiple profiles per phone.

Apple could do the same, with sufficient internal or external motivation.

Yeah but then maybe families will maybe only buy one iPad instead of maybe buy multiple so it's not happening.

Apple can charge $$$ for each extra profile:

  - earn high margin revenue with low input costs
  - save planetary raw materials 
  - save customer time, energy and space costs
  - improve customer security via data segregation
  - increase per-device storage revenue

As AI advocates say, more efficiency leads to larger markets.

Ignoring customer needs via artificial inefficiency leads to stagnant growth.

The EU is somewhat trying to kill this at least. It is very annoying.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_24_...

Depends on what it is. Apps absolutely shouldn't be geo-blocked. While I agree that other media shouldn't be geo-blocked, it's more to do with distribution rights and licensing deals and isn't really something Apple can solve for directly, save to support banning the practice in the EU. The EU needs to focus on Hollywood for movies and the music industry to deal with that.

Yeah, I'm more talking about the credit card discrimination specifically. I have an Apple account for Ireland that I can't add my German credit card to. Although I would love the EU to enforce a singular EU media distribution region / market somehow.

this! especially because lots of their content doesn't have audio on a specific language unless it's bought in that country's iTunes store.

Indeed, and they recently blocked the workaround I was using, namely: e-mail aliases are no longer allowed.

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