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Comment by pirates

3 hours ago

If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious

You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.

  • I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.

  • AFAIK reverting region to UK wont work. First of all you cant change regions more often than a year (or close to it).

    Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.

  • What a crazy answer you've written. In the sense of: it's wild that the procedure is like that.

    It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.

    • Off topic - but I am not sure that is true in the UK/EU - did it happen elsewhere in the world?:

      Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_%28commercial_avi...

I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.

From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.

So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.

Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd

Yeah, good point. I wonder what would happen if someone without ADP in the UK changed over the region settings to the United States, switched ADP on, and then switched the region back to the UK. I wonder if anybody's tried this?

I think country is associated with the iCloud/Apple ID account, not the physical device.

  • To an extent. My account is on a different country. Even using a VPN, I was still asked to verify my age to access certain websites. The only explanation I could think of is that iOS abused my consent to them using location data for that.