I was unopinionated about Apple's walled garden until the events of last week. Now I'm pro side-loading. If you've been on the fence, hope this changes your mind.
Still it's a good reminder of what you're getting into with walled gardens.
More broadly, it is a real shame how corporations have turned mobile internet into the complete opposite of what it could achieve.
Ideally, the only thing tied to a specific hardware or software provider should be your identity.
And imho, said provider should be controlled by state government, and be accessible from any device, given the proof of identity.
If that is the case I am surprised that is the first time you ran into a geo locked app and didn't already have another Apple account for that region that you could log into. This was one of the first things I quickly learned to do if I wanted my iPhone to be useful at all when I spent many months living in a (non-Western) country. (using apps for their services)
(I had the same thought as you at first :)
Your response is kinda shitty toward the very part where I was trying to validate their misread as reasonable. Decent strangers sometimes do that for one another
While the submission does make an important point, it seems a bit obfuscated by accusing Apple exclusively.
Seems like main benefit of the side-loading was bypassing the geofence.
And while native apps provide heavier geo-attribution (thus, probably harder to fake), I'm not sure if this is solely an Android vs Apple thing.