356
Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
356 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
77843 readers
3703 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh true competition. Nice.
It would be amazing knowing if as a tourist one can have access to a different browser in iPhone or sideload crazy apps that block ads without questioning.
If it’s anything like the EU setup, it’s based off of where your iCloud account is based out of. At least I think that was what it was last time I went looking.
Nope, Apple is way more anal than that.
You need to have an iCloud account registered in the EU/Japan, AND be physically located in EU/Japan.
Changing the iCloud account region requires you to contact Apple, surrendering all of your current account balance, and providing them with an EU/Japan billing method + address. Users have also reported mixed results with VPNs in getting around the physical location requirement.
About alternative app distribution - Apple Support - https://support.apple.com/en-us/118110
Uh, well you can already have a different browser. I know Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Brave are all on iOS. Brave has built in adblocking, but AdGuard is also available if you want to block ads in Safari. I’m in North America, but I assume they are available worldwide.
I wouldn’t call them different browsers, more like skins or “chrome”. All iOS browsers are built on Apple WebKit. This essentially makes all of them reskinned versions of Safari.
Sure they may have some clever UI, accessibility, or platform specific functionality. But they are nothing like any of those browsers on other operating systems.
They still all use the safari engine though, unless something has changed and I missed it.
No, and it’s annoying because Safari’s extensions I’ll let you install ad blockers, but they won’t work on Firefox even though it’s still Safari
Extensions work on Orion
So I guess it’s a Mozilla problem and not Apple