That title is clickbait. I don’t see any indication the system is ‘hidden’. They wouldn’t call the process countryd if they tried to hide it, and the iOS releas

That title is clickbait. I don’t see any indication the system is ‘hidden’. They wouldn’t call the process countryd if they tried to hide it, and the iOS release notes often state Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213407 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213407) Given (FTA) “Currently, Apple uses hard-coding techniques to restrict iOS features in specific locations”, it looks more like a refactoring to me (“we have several places where we try to determine the country a device is in. Let’s do that well in one place instead”) that makes the ‘feature’ less hidden. Now: feature or misfeature? It depends on whether one wants Apple to act like a law abiding citizen. I would think almost everyone will say that depends on the law they’re abiding to, but opinions will differ on what laws they should fight. For example, should they prevent searches for abortion clinics or change country borders in maps depending on location?