Comment by rock_artist
12 hours ago
I live in the EU and now traveling my family outside the EU. Today I’ve tried updating AltStore but it won’t let me. Even VPNing to my home won’t do it.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
This is the future of the internet. More and more countries have their local laws and international companies need to comply with local laws. This has been the case forever for companies selling products and (physical) services and some digital services restricting music and movie rights in certain countries, but it will expand to more and more services and apps in the future.
Good. It was hubris to think that the internet would forever be segregated as an American asset.
"Local laws" is quite the loaded term when your parent commenter's anecdote is about EU which currently encompasses 27 countries.
And when "comply with local laws" means "unbrick bluetooth pairing for third-party devices" then a company in good faith could just, you know, not brick the functionality in the first place. There's no law against products that "just work".