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The Windows ecosystem reboot is bad news if you plan to move country
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- willthames 14y agoAlso 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.
- tomflack 14y agoAnd 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.
- veidr 14y agoOh, 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
- tomflack 14y agoAndroid.
- kalleboo 14y agoAndroid 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.
- shinratdr 14y agoWhat about Android devices without 3G? Like all WiFi only Android tablets or Galaxy S players?
- madrona 14y agoAt 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.
- navs 14y agoYes 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.
- csense 14y agoI'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.
- zainny 14y agoThis 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.
- manojlds 14y agoI 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
- underwater 14y agoI've been bitten by this too. I like my Windows Phone, but having to do a factory reset to a new account when moving to a new country was infuriating. I don't see why individual purchases can't be linked to a region (and region specific credit card) rather than the entire account.
- veidr 14y agoThis 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).
- TillE 14y agoYeah, 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?
- nivloc 14y agoAmazon 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.
- Vivtek 14y agoIt'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?
- arcatek 14y agoSame 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). Really, region-lock sucks.
- vacri 14y agoThe justification is probably licensing. The content owners may have separate exclusivity deals with different publishers in different countries.
- w1ntermute 14y agoYet 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.
- fakeer 14y agoThough 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 :-)
- evoxed 14y agoI 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).
- dendory 14y agoHonestly 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoSounds like something the EU may want to deal with, considering their freedom of movement.
- kalleboo 14y agoI 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.
- radicalbyte 14y agoSorry, 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).
- pyre 14y agoThen 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).
- praptak 14y ago"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.
- bluedanieru 14y agoI 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.
- praptak 14y agoMicrosoft'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.)
- dasil003 14y agoI'll grant your overzealous hyperbole just on the strength of finding that quote.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- moconnor 14y agoFrom his perspective he was, perhaps, correct. Do "peasants moving around" increase the rent on his land in real terms?
- ekianjo 14y agoPeople 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.
- yardie 14y agoI 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.
- diggan 14y agoI 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.
- Toshio 14y agoSee, 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.
- forgottenpaswrd 14y agoSounds 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- malsme 14y agoSimple 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.
- rmc 14y agoI 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. :)
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoWait, SkyDrive is regionally locked? Isn't portability and universal accessibility the main purpose of cloud storage?
- aroberge 14y agoThis definitely needs to be emphasized.
- lignuist 14y agoIt's like selling water and extracting all the H2O before.
- sp332 14y agoI 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!
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoWhat 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.)
- sp332 14y agoThe 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.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoWhich is the expected solution, assuming Microsoft doesn't try to prevent you from doing so as a result of your location.
- josscrowcroft 14y agoI get this, and why it's frustrating - but I'm still gonna call First World Problems on it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- da_n 14y agoI 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?
- josscrowcroft 14y agoYes.
- acabal 14y agoTo 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.
- mguillemot 14y agoTo 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).
- Dylan16807 14y agoFor 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.
- sunkencity 14y ago"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.
- junto 14y agoApple, PayPal and a vast array of other global brands have no support for someone moving to a different country. I mean, who would voluntarily want to leave the US? It's unthinkable. Edge case, get used to it. Don't live the dream....
- Shorel 14y agoThis is good news for Steam.
- mxfh 14y agoWell 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. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2452829 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2452829 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/zune/forum/account-phone/the-location-setting-for-your-windows-live-id/5fc29ee2-413c-4652-91a1-2c5cbbf46a57?msgId=9e1c2ffd-4ecf-4866-bf3b-ddb2afe80018 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/zune/forum/account-phone/...