This is a real problem for 'internationally oriented' people. I don't do MS/Xbox, so cannot speak to that, but I do Android/Google, iOS/Apple, and Kindle/Amazon.
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).
I'm not based in the US and I find the situation is reversed.
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.
Well, that sounds pretty cool, but I believe there are various DRM workarounds if you jailbreak an iOS device, too. (Market Access requires you to root your phone, right?)
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.
Actually there are no DRM workarounds (short of pirating the apps) if you jailbreak an iOS device. MarketAccess allows you to legally purchase the apps.
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.
> 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.
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.
Hmm, thanks for the tip about about the SIM card; I was excited to read that, as I happened to have a US SIM card in my bag (here in Tokyo).
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.)
I don't do MS/Xbox, so cannot speak to that, but I do Android/Google, iOS/Apple, and Kindle/Amazon.
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.
Nah you can do it as many times as you want and the books are in the same listing on your kindle regardless. You have to switch your "account" while actually buying the books.
I had the exact same thing happen in Canada. Asked for Amazon gift cards for the Kindle I just got for Christmas. Got hundreds of dollars worth. None of it usable for my actual Kindle because they were "Canadian" Amazon not "US" Amazon gift cards.
After being very confused, I was very disappointed.
I'm less than 100% certain, but I think this is accounting/tax law at work. The UK entity sold you a gift card. The liability for that is on their books. They can't just move that number over to the US entity. They're separate. That explains the gift cards, the Kindle thing is either contracts with publishers or something else, but something they probably could solve.
Even though we are a tiny fraction the size of Netflix, it seems a good time to mention that at MUBI we try our best to do the right thing. That is, if you subscribe to MUBI in one country, you can use that subscription in any other country. This is non-trivial because film rights are highly localized and we have different films available around the world, but we have at least a few hundred in every single country. But it gives you the advantage that you can travel and see new films that wouldn't otherwise be available.
It definitely does get thorny around integrations (PS3/PSN billing), but it's something we actively think about.
Actually it doesn't let you use MUBI with a PSN account registered to a different country than the one you are currently in (it must use IP checks I presume). You need to register a new PSN account for every country.
Right, well that's why I mentioned it. This is an impedance mismatch between our systems. PSN billing is based on account affiliation, MUBI geofiltering based purely on IP.
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.
Great! I know for a fact that Netflix does this, so it's good to see you guys are inheriting the better parts of Netflix ;). I have a Canadian Netflix account, which while in Canada can only access licensed Canadian content, but while in the States I have access to the whole gamut of goodies that are available here and not back at home.
> 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.
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?
Yes, that is what makes Apple's way superior to Google's; your valid account from one country doesn't stop working when you go to another country.
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.
Developers can select the country app stores their apps are available in. It wasn't relevant for my app but if an app can't really be used in the other country why risk support requests and bad reviews when you might actually want to launch a functional version there one day.
Why? To use the examples of the grandparent comment: there are always overseas Japanese who want to cook, or tourists who want to use a local navigation app. I can only come up with legal reasons, or bandwidth preservation maybe.
If you meant Google a/c attached to an Android device then I would like to differ. I created an account in Korea and used it extensively in India and it also worked well in USA. And yes, on all the three places more than one device was used with the account, over the time.
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.
Yeah, Apple and iTunes are no trouble at all if you can maintain a valid payment method in one country. Amazon is very similar, I think. I've had no trouble buying digital media with a US account while living in Europe.
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?
Amazon and Steam work the same for me in Canada/Latin America - have to use a local card. That said, I've still been able to make some purchases without switching. I've long given trying to understand the nuances of it.
I've moved my Apple account between 3 countries now - while I can't update some apps through iTunes, the updates are always available on the devices themselves, and if I try to buy an app purchased in another country, it downloads it without any hassle.
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).
> I've moved my Apple account between 3 countries now - while I can't update some apps through iTunes, the updates are always available on the devices themselves
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.
"They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly" -- The Duke of Wellington, on early steam railroads.
This is how the content industry perceives us. We are viewed as peasants tied to the land, sheep contained within fencing. We are supposed to stay where we are so that we can be sheared effectively.
I don't think it's quite that bad. It's more that implementing a system that will be convenient for users while simultaneously keeping the copyright cartels shut the fuck up, is difficult at best, from a legal and technical point of view (practically, impossible, since the copyright cartels never shut completely the fuck up).
But seriously, neither Microsoft, nor Apple, nor Google think of you as sheep. Facebook? Maybe.
Microsoft's XBox ecosystem is a fenced pasture, same goes for Apple's app store but I believe that these are only split into regions under external pressure, therefore are outside of the scope of my original rant (I reserve the right to rant about them on another occasion :) )
My rant was about what you call copyright cartels and I called, perhaps less precisely, the content industry. These are the ones who like their sheep neatly separated into physical pastures (geographical regions) and push for crap like DVD region coding and keeping the geographical fences on the virtual pastures of other companies (like Apple or Microsoft.)
This also impacts you as a developer in the Microsoft ecosystem. I signed up for a Windows Phone developer account and released several WP7 applications while living in Canada. I just recently moved back home to Australia and on trying to update my contact details, payment information, etc. found that everything is locked to Canada (and, subsequently, bank/credit accounts that are now closed).
Words can not express how poorly I think of Microsoft at this point.
It's a problem for Nintendo, believe it or not. My 13-year-old son saved up to buy a game now that we've relocated to Hungary - the chip wouldn't even load on his American 3DS. Insane. Fortunately he got store credit, but ... why in the world?
Yet another win for piracy. It's amusing to hear people complain about all these things. It doesn't matter what country I'm in, my private torrent site functions without any problems.
Though it's not connected to the comment you commented upon but I recently tried buying some music at one of my country's leading online stores (Flipkart) and the MP3s (no choice of other formats) were of poor quality and without any ID3 tags or so. After almost a week's <me-customer support-me> game, I gave up and acquired the songs from TPB (or IPT maybe). This time there was no guilt :-)
Same here. I'm living in Quebec for the next few months, and I had to order the last Pokemon in Europe (and pay shipping, hurrah !) to be able to play.
What's the justification ? "Region dependant features" (sorry ? you have to lock the hardware instead of enabling/disabling features at runtime ?), and "parental access" (well, I'm over 18, and I allow me to play. It doesn't seem enough in the Nintendo world, however).
I heard about this recently, iirc it's new to the 3DS. I was surprised, because in the past Nintendo systems have been pretty apathetic regarding regional restrictions. I have two Japanese DS lites which play fine (Japan and US games, others too presumably).
I guess it was just hearsay then. I'm not much of a gamer but my friends never seemed to have any complaints and I do recall mixing and matching now and again (though on what systems I'm going to be second guessing from now on). Apparently the Gamecube had region protection as well.
Nintendo's home consoles have always been region-locked, via intentional hardware differences on the NES/Famicom, SNES, and n64, and via software means on everything newer. The Game Boy line and original DS (including DS Lite) are not region-locked at all. The DSi is regioned for DSi-enabled software, including DS/DSi hybrid software like Pokémon Black and White. The 3DS is region-locked in software.
Up to the 3DS, I could play games from anywhere (I like Japanese games a lot). I have happily purchased three different generations of Nintendo portable machines and the software to go with them.
Honestly it's nothing new and will only get worse. That's why I'm always very skeptical of cloud systems, inter linking of accounts, and having so much of your digital life under one company's roof. What if you want to move country? What if you upload a piece of data innocently that is deemed to breach ToS? What if the company simply bans your account without telling you why? What if they close down? There are a million reason, which is why we need more small, decentralized solutions, and less services that try to integrate everything under the sun like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook have been doing.
I presume the poster could use EU data protection / privacy law here? Companies are legally required to keep personal data accurately, and if you tell them that the data they hold on you is incorrect, they are required to correct it.
A simple formal letter / email to them saying "My address / country of residence is X" should be all that's legally required. You may need to contact your local Data Protection / Information Commissioner to get them to enforce it.
If their systems can't handle it, then storing personal data in that system is illegal. :)
Also a problem for the Apple App Store - I recently moved countries and all the apps I'd paid for (including OS X Lion) were no longer available to download until I switched back my details to the old country.
And Android (to a lesser extent). While I was in China, I was blocked from buying any apps as paid apps aren't available there. Even dialing a VPN wasn't enough - the phone knew where it was.
With the amount of stuff(TM) that we buy digitally now, this is becoming a huge problem.
Android goes off the country of the SIM card that's in it, last I checked. So either you can pop in a foreign SIM and make your purchase over WiFi (this worked for me even with an expired SIM), or use an app such as MarketEnabler to spoof your SIM carrier code.
Oh, really? That's the first I have heard of Apple using geographical location to disable features, rather than using the location that issued the credit card linked to the account.
Come to think of it, last year in Shanghai, I did buy a GPS map app for iPhone using my US app store account... is this something new (and lame) that Apple is doing, or did you mean something different?
EDIT: Oops, sorry, I guess I should have read your comment far enough to get to the second word where you clearly indicated you are talking about Android... :-p
Yes this is annoying but not on the level of Microsoft. Some apps are only available in the U.S. App Store. If you switch stores to say, New Zealand then you lose access to those apps. But iTunes does allow you to easily change stores and download your U.S. only apps provided you still have a valid U.S. payment method and address. You can then change stores again but your locally downloaded apps remain. It's inconvenient and messy.
At least you had the ability to modify your details in that case. With this blogpost it sounds like your location is immutable once your account is created.
I thought it was odd that the article claimed that you can't export data from SkyDrive. It's dead simple to "export" since the data is synced to your computer anyway!
What if your computer dies? Is there an easy way to get the data back? What if your computer dies and you've moved to another country? (These are honest questions - I'm not asking rhetorically.)
The main feature of skydrive is dropbox-ish cloud storage that syncs a folder on your computer with their online storage. To "recover" you can just log in to a web browser and download the files.
I guess the "expected solution" would be that you can install the desktop client on a new computer, log in to your account and start syncing from anywhere in the world.
I've always been amazed at how crappy various forms of region locking are -- DVD's and game consoles come to mind.
It's not necessarily bad news for the company: Making your customers purchase the same product multiple times sounds like a great business model, if you can get consumers to accept it. Which people generally do, unfortunately.
To some extent this is a problem with Diablo 3 and Battle.net in general too. If you (like I did) travel to Europe, download/play D3 on the EU servers, then come back home to the US, you'll find that your character is forever trapped in the Europe zone, and you'll have to start a new one in the US zone if you want to play with < 1000ms ping.
I have no idea why companies still region lock things when almost the entire point of the internet was to be a global network.
To be fair with Blizzard, they DO allow you to create characters in any of the 3 zones (Europe/America/Asia) with any valid account, which is an improvement over their previous games. But true, you'd better give some thoughts about which one you really want to use before starting the game. Which is a shame when half of your friends are playing in Europe, the other in Americas, and you yourself live in Japan.
Being in the field of online games and payments, I think the main reason they don't allow you to transfer characters between zones is the Real Money Auction House (for legal reasons and not to allow inter-zone speculation).
For Diablo they do. For starcraft if you want to play with someone on a different continent... well it's supposedly coming soon. I mean the game's only been out for over two years, can't expect them to have the multiplayer working.
I remember reading that Apple was preparing to merge all the iTunes stores in the Eurozone into a master EU store after pressure from the EU, but I don't know if that was just rumors or it's still in progress.
I was bitten by this. Hailing from India and living in Canada, having bought a new Xbox that came with a game download, I was not able to download it because the game was not allowed in my region. I had to create a new account for it
People who travel and change location once in a while have been learning for a long time, like me, that having an open system is the best bet to avoid trouble. If you use anything else, you never know in what situation you will be in sooner or later.
I travel and really, Apple seems to be the least encumbered. The only thing they need is a valid credit card for the store of the country (I believe this partially functions to verify you exist and serves as an age check). I did that then deleted it, and loaded about $100 worth of giftcards into the account.
Unlike my Google music experience, iTunes Match works. Using DNS forwarding Netflix works.
Well it gets even better, if you ever dare to try to update your Windows Phone with Zune, your host Windows locale has to be the same as the country you set up your Windows Live ID with.
Godspeed you 21st century travelling multilingual expat.
Sorry, this cannot be right. I've had an Xbox and an Xbox Live account linked to my MSN since 2001.
In 2006 I moved from the UK to The Netherlands, in the opposite direction of the guy in the blog post.
I've never had a problem buying anything on Xbox Live: the only issue I've had is the same as with all networks: they always give me the terms + conditions in Dutch with no option to switch to English (which was only an issue for the first 18 months, after that time my Dutch was good enough to read it).
Then tell me how to change the region on your XBox Live account so that it will allow you to enter a credit card for a different country (the address section is tied to the region).
"ecosystem" in regards to computer software has got to be one of the worst analogies. It invokes all sort of mushy animistic preconceived notions from way back when, like the concept of divine harmony. I much preferred when people talked about software running on the Windows platform, or the mac platform, rather than propping them up with some sort of life-spirit.
I had the same problem with Google Play on my Android device. I moved to Spain and now I can only buy spanish books which is a little too early for me right now.
There isn't even a setting for which language you want your content in. That would be a first step.
So as said, it isn't just Windows who got a problem with moving across borders.
Sounds curious for me because I don't play games that much, but it must be the 10th person that talks to me about this "problem" that their xbox "achievements" are lost like is some kind of tragedy.
It means a lot for them, I can't really understand that.
Simple answer: don't rely on "cloud" services. There's often a good reason for these restrictions, such as copyright and IP limitations. If you want to own something, then actually own it.
I am really starting to dislike this meme. Yeah, this is not something the UN needs to weigh in on, I get that. You have managed to both state the obvious and betray patronising superiority. Congratulations. Do you go around dismissing lots of opinions all day with that quip simply because they are not opinions about how to source water in arid territories, or how to keep goats healthy?
See, microsoft lives in a bubble world nobody has disrupted until very recently. To microsoft, the end-users and the customers are two very different groups of people. The customer (and decision maker) is the purchasing manager at xyz large corporation, the person whom microsoft goes out of their way to wine and dine and schmooze. The end-user is the employee who is forced to work with sub-par technology. The end-user has to suck it up or be shown the door.
Apparently some genius at microsoft has decided that this tried-and-true approach from the business world is also the secret key to winning consumers' hearts and minds.
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).