I have an app (Market Access) for my Android phone that allows me to control what network gets reported to the Play store, so I can install apps from wherever - I just set it to T-mobile US and I'll get the US store.
When I had an iPhone, many apps weren't available locally. I had to buy a $10 gift card (purchased with a US credit card) from a dodgy site in the far east. I used that to set up a new Apple account, and ended up juggling stuff between the two accounts. The only way to add credit to the US account was via more (200% markup) gift cards. Apple chases after the gift card resellers, so locating a reliable supply is difficult. I ended up mostly downloading free apps from the US store.
I was mostly speaking to the way these markets and devices are intended to operate. Basically they all suck, but the implementation details may make one less of a pain in the ass than another, for a given situation. In Apple's case, I think they are the most convenient if you already have a credit card in every country you care about purchasing from.
Your original point about Google's geographically restrictions is technically wrong. It's not based on your geolocation but on the simcard inside the phone. If have a simcard from the USA then putting it inside an Android phone gives you access to the USA store even while in Thailand—you can still download over WiFi.
Moreover Android's system solves the problem stated in the original article i.e. move to a new country and Google switches over to that country's store. Move to another and Google switches again. All your apps already downloaded continue to work. All apps purchased can be redownloaded if they aren't restricted in the new country. There is no need to have separate Google Play accounts for different countries or merge accounts.
I have one Google Play account. I have four iTunes accounts (USA, Canada, UK and Japan). Android gets it right imo.
It's both. For apps in the Play Store it is generally SIM-based, but for "content" (i.e. Music, Movies & TV, Books, Magazines) there's a geographic block on the stores in addition to the SIM check. Even with that, Music and Books are semi-sane (you can use them wherever after purchase). Movies & TV, OTOH, is batshit crazy. Even after buying something you can't stream it or download it if you fail either the SIM check or the geographic check. Even playing things you've already downloaded can be an issue.
On top of that, you have devices without SIMs (e.g. tablets) which have a geographic check on everything, including apps. And then there are the corner cases...
P.S. These days even previously-purchased / downloaded apps can be re-downloaded even when restricted in a country because they still show up in your purchase history.
But, after replacing the Docomo SIM with the US SimpleMobile SIM and rebooting, while I do indeed get some variant of the US store, I still can't access various things I've purchased or that I would be able to access from within the USA (movies, magazines) presumably because I am physically located in Japan, and those items aren't available here.
So they are doing something with the SIM card, clearly--putting in the US card changes my Play store to some lobotomized version of the US store with whole sections missing. But they are also somehow using my physical location to restrict my account block my access to things I have purchased in the USA.
With Apple's credit card-based authorization, this does not happen.
Either way sucks, but for me personally Apple's way is a lot better, because things don't stop working when I physically move. (They would instead stop working if I had to cancel all my credit cards in one country, though.)
Yeah, that's the problem right there. For me apps haven't been a problem, music, movies, and TV shows are definitely a problem.
And the fact that giftcards aren't ubiquitous for Play.
I got a Kindle as a birthday gift from my better half. In advance, I had told family members that I was getting a Kindle one way or the other, so I asked them to please don't buy me physical books. "Please give me giftcards for Amazon instead".
Fair enough. So said. So they did. And that was when I was in for a surprise.
You cannot get a UK-model Kindle outside the UK, so my better half had ordered a US-model.
Normally, when buying from Amazon, I have always in the past ordered books from amazon.co.uk, because they are geographically closer to me here in Europe and it just feels more natural. And seemingly so had a few of the giftcard-buyers thought as well.
Imagine my surprise when I find out I cannot redeem my UK giftcard-code in the US-store and that I cannot order Kindle-books for my US-kindle in the UK-store where I was forced to redeem my code.
In the end I had to buy physical books after all.
Granted: Amazon is by far one of the better players in the field. But because of that, this leaking out of internal business processes onto me, their customer, took me by great surprise.
I had honestly expected better from them.
After being very confused, I was very disappointed.
It definitely does get thorny around integrations (PS3/PSN billing), but it's something we actively think about.
Great service though.
I'm not sure if they verify that you are in the UK when you create a UK PSN account or if it just requires a UK credit card, but at any rate, once you have it, you can use it anywhere in the world. This conflicts directly with MUBI's licensing rights where we have different film rights in each country and can only stream certain films with certain subtitles in different countries. Because we are integrated with PSN billing and we have a PPV option this makes it impossible to support a foreign account because the user would be paying the wrong amount, in the wrong currency, and this would not meet our agreements with rightsholders. This is just one of many thorny issues (don't get me started on sub-regions like Isle of Man which have the same PSN store despite different ISO country). Technically the gap could be bridged, but the sheer weight of the logic in the code and also for our accountants to sort out is not justifiable.
However, the essence of our service is that if you buy a subscription from us you can use it anywhere in the world. Currently for PS3 that means you have to buy it from us and not from Sony, and also you do have to contact us to re-affiliate your MUBI account with a different PSN account if you move. We have plans to improve that so you can have multiple PSN accounts affiliated with a single MUBI account though that itself is also a significant engineering initiative that has not made it to the top of the priority list yet. As imperfect a solution as that is, once set up it will actually work even for people who regularly move between multiple countries, and I believe we are ahead of any premium content streaming company in that regard.
And I don't have to pay a cent extra :).
Why not deal with one country only? I have been using my German Apple ID quite happily on three continents. I may miss out on some movies, music and especially iBooks, but there are plenty of other sources. The only hard downside is that some local apps are limited to the respective App Store, e.g. the Australian Optus Mobile (carrier) app.
I think Apple's account system is needlessly complicated, but what problems are there if you stick to one account?
But there are still reasons to use two accounts. In Japan there are apps which are only available in the Japanese app store (although I cannot understand why). For example, I use some navigation apps and my wife uses some cooking apps that are only available in Japan.
For example there are 3 million foreign residents here in Japan, and fully 165% of them have iPhones and 195% of those want train routing apps.*
(*: all figures based on anecdotes and extrapolation)
There's my friend who bought his iPad in Holland and he is in India now but the language of his iPad app store is still Dutch. He says he can change it but that comes with some trouble he is not willing to go through.
There are country specific apps on almost all the app ecosystems.
Almost everyone else uses geocoding to enforce your location, which is infuriating. I really don't understand why, if I have a completely valid US credit card and billing address, you refuse to sell me things that are available in the US. If Amazon.com will sell me downloadable games without complaint, why is Steam so stringent about checking my current location?
My only credit card is US based, and so I was pretty frustrated for a night trying to purchase one of the bundles from my humble Yokohaman abode...
The Mac App store is a bit different - you cannot redownload apps purchased on another country (so when I reinstalled Mac OS and needed to install iPhoto, I had to revert my account to the previous country).
How did you set this up? For me to download an app from another country, I need to log out of my current store and log into the other one. It's annoying, and causes problems.
> The Mac App store is a bit different - you cannot redownload apps purchased on another country (so when I reinstalled Mac OS and needed to install iPhoto, I had to revert my account to the previous country).
That's how it works on iOS. You just need to log into the other account. That it's on a desktop just makes it easier.
I have been living multinationally for the past several years and it is a serious hindrance on all three of these 'ecosystems'.
Apple seems the easiest to work with as long as you maintain an account and a credit card in every country you want to deal with. Their devices all support multiple accounts, albeit with significant inconvenience, and they do not disable features based on your geographical location.
Amazon is not as good, but I only use them for Kindle so it doesn't faze me as much and I just deal with having a US account.
Google is the worst of these three in my experience, because their digital restrictions and feature-disabling systems are mainly based on physical geographic location (which they sometimes get wrong), not the location of the linked credit card. This means, for instance, that I can buy a Google phone in San Francisco and not even be able to look up my order the next week when I am back in Tokyo. (The product isn't available here so you can't even see it--even in the purchase history section when logged into the account.)
All of these systems are horribly flawed from the multinational customer's perspective. But essentially, big corporate doesn't really give two shits about the minute percentage of users that live/work in more than one country, so I doubt this problem will get better.
In fact, I expect it to get worse as more companies copy Apple's platform-as-closed-monoculture concept (as e.g. Microsoft is doing).