>I don't think it's that simple, at least with Google the phone seems to see the country code of the SIM card, or the mobile network it's connected to, to determine your "current country" for the Google Play Store

eject your sim card then, or download an esim from another country and turn on airplane mode

>Maybe it will even ask you for a credit card number plus ZIP and country, that Google/Apple can confirm with your CC provider, if you say "Oh it's 90210 USA" and your CC billing address is 200000 Shanghai, your CC provider will say "verification failed".

apple explicitly has a "none" payment option[1]

[1] https://www.tuneskit.com/images/resource/no-none-option-for-...

>It seems like the CCP asking Apple to ban these apps mean that they're getting more afraid about their leaky firewall, blocking them from being downloaded from the app store is another hurdle they've thought of for the Chinese citizenry.

Their firewall tech is top notch[2]. Getting past it is non-trivial (ie. you can't just buy nordvpn subscription and be on your way). Compared to that creating an alt apple account is easy.

[2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat...