This is so true. We moved to another country and changing everything from my location in the google play store (requires a form of payment from the new country) to opening a second PayPal account with another email was painful. I still think the change of cell phone numbers was the worst. It seems the assumption with all applications is that we will be born and die with the same number now. I will have to memorialize my cell number on my tombstone.

How would you expect global number portability to work when each country more or less has their own country code and unique numbering plan?

A US to Canada or vice versa move would work since they’re on the same system, but a UK number, for instance, doesn’t even have the same digits of numbers necessarily, and even if they’re both 10, they’re completely different formats.

Not OP, but I think they mean changing their mobile number setting inside of their online accounts is impossible. When they moved, they got a new number format but their existing account won’t let them change the format.

Yes.. It is near impossible to change a phone number for most accounts. My US banks would not allow for the same amount of digits as my European phone number had. Wiring money from my own accounts wanted to send a 4 digit pin to my US number which would not work in France. You seem to imply that in 2023, we are not capable of making a banking application accept more than one format of phone number. And the fact that google cannot figure out I live in another country (and I have to enter a bank card with address in an app store or else I am blocked from certain apps) is laughable.

I mean, why would a bank care about phone numbers outside of the country it serves? Do you expect a US bank to recognize the number systems of every single one of the 195 countries out there when 99.9% of their customers live in one? Do you expect a French one? An Ethiopian one? It's not like they lose a whole lot of business if they don't support it; it's an edge case at best, especially when most people do get new phone numbers when they move.

And Google certainly knows you live in a new country, but you likely have to accept new Terms based on the country you move to, and there are more than likely fraud policies in place specifically to prevent people abusing a system like that to get lower pricing. The required step is there as policy, not a technical necessity.

Google certainly moves accounts between countries automatically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27560705

At least according to that they won't ask you to accept new ToS, probably due to the fact ToS allows them to change ToS at will.

The reason for this often is that the service works differently for different regions and depending on how it was implemented (as in launched quickly not thinking of multiple scenarios) you may have an account with US activity (transactions, kyc details, reporting, etc) that would be messed up if they simply switched the country flag on your account. So often customer support doesn’t even have the capability to do that, and the request has to go all the way to product managers and sent down to devs to handle just this one account. And a dev might suggest making this process easier and letting the customer do that themselves (requires streamlining reporting, transaction processing, etc), and this will be shot down because the estimated cost is much higher that processing this “one off” request. And this will repeat for all such one offs.