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My worst experience was that after arriving in a new country the Play store didn't show local apps because my Google account was assigned to the old country. And changing the country wasn't easy and meant abandoning the old country and it's apps. Since I travel a bit back and forth I ended up buying a second phone and creating an account for the new country.

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This is indeed extremely annoying and I never understood why so many apps are configured to only be available in specific countries. Like what at all do they stand to gain doing this?

Google will then go on to complain about users installing APKs from shady sources but this practice pushes users to do so. I'm sure a decent amount of users ended up with malware on their phones just because they wanted to install an app that wasn't available in their listed country.

You solve it the best way to fit your case I guess. On android I created a set of alternative accounts that each belong to a different country.

All accounts can be active at the same time on the same phone, there is a dropdown to switch in the Store app, and that works even with a work profile on the side. I've yet to see real downsides, except for course remembering which account is on which country and manually switching.

Thank you. I may try the same when the time comes to ditch the old phone.

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