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Comment by kaishiro | Hacker News Reader

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kaishiro

Unless you happen to have subscriptions in multiple locales. Now you're forced to:

- Change your country/region

- Be forced to add a new credit card, regardless of how many times you've done this before

- Attempt to load your subscriptions, and receive a "Cannot Connect" error no matter how many times you try

- Restart your phone because its the only thing that seems to resolve this

- Successfully manage your subscriptions now that they will load

- Repeat the entire process again to get back to your original locale

This...could be easier.

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I believe that Apple could make this (using more than one country/locale for purchases/subscriptions) a lot better to switch between, but hasn't done so for a long time. I don't think Apple will focus on this anytime soon though.

I think the simpler workaround is to have multiple Apple ID/accounts, one for each country and linked to specific payment options. It still requires signing out and signing in, but it avoids restrictions (IIRC, something like 90 days) and the need to re-update payment information as with the other approach you mentioned. The subscriptions may not work when you're not signed in to the account associated with its country, but this is simpler than following many more steps.

I find it silly that Apple does not even consider switching between two countries as a use case that would apply for quite a number of people (it may be less in percentage terms, but surely a large enough number in absolute terms).

No one does this... Well I guess not "no one" because I guess you do it. But I can say with 100% certainty that 99% of people don't do it.

Banking applications are typically localized to the country. Dual citizens, or people with multiple residencies, typically have banking facilities in multiple countries.

This is obviously not the mainline use case, but to suggest that "no one" does this simply because you do not is obviously naive.

> subscriptions in multiple locales

I haven't heard of this. Is it a supported case by Apple?

As far as I understand, you need to change the app store country when you move internationally and have a bank account in another country. To keep purchases made before the move, you need to switch regions.

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