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Comment by pirates | Hacker News Reader

If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious

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You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.

What a crazy answer you've written. In the sense of: it's wild that the procedure is like that.

It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.

Off topic - but I am not sure that is true in the UK/EU - did it happen elsewhere in the world?:

Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_%28commercial_avi...

Yeah, ghost flights had been a thing long before Covid came around, but the length of the pandemic and its impact on air travel forced people to rethink the situation. Having a policy for making exceptions was really long overdue

I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.

Why did it take 2 months and proofs to change your country on a private platform? Could you have created a new account and avoided that headache?

With that, I would have the headache to transfer my files, apps, subscriptions, bought stuff, and other data. It was still way less painful, and less waste of my time, because that 2 months obviously wasn't an active waiting, but for example the mentioned waiting for my subscription to be ended after cancellation, or waiting for my new bank card. It was mainly just annoying that after every step there was more waiting, because they weren't clear upfront what they exactly needed, for example which subscriptions I needed to cancel.

Huh, my experience was that it was really easy, I just needed to add a payment method from the new region, which to be fair may be hard if you’re not a resident of that region.

AFAIK reverting region to UK wont work. First of all you cant change regions more often than a year (or close to it).

Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.

What does the region even do? why not just stay in france mode?

Region affects pricing, what payments methods are availanle or accepted and also what apps are available. Some banks, government service apps and few commercial companies limit apps to certain regions.

Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.

Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.

I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.

From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.

So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.

Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd

Yeah, good point. I wonder what would happen if someone without ADP in the UK changed over the region settings to the United States, switched ADP on, and then switched the region back to the UK. I wonder if anybody's tried this?

Some other comments are discussing this. I just tried it but could still not enable ADP. Perhaps subscriptions etc. additionally require cancellation, as rumoured.

I think country is associated with the iCloud/Apple ID account, not the physical device.

To an extent. My account is on a different country. Even using a VPN, I was still asked to verify my age to access certain websites. The only explanation I could think of is that iOS abused my consent to them using location data for that.

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