I don’t expect most iPhone users to ever change their default settings, but it’s nice that it will be possible in a year.
Who knows, maybe one day you can run actual Firefox on them too? :p
I wonder what counted as “an EU iPhone”?
The serial number? GPS location of the phone? IP address?
How could one outside of EU region to have an “EU iphone”?
An European iPhone, aka an iPhone which will get these features, is identified by a background process named
countryd
, introduced in iOS 16. Its only purpose is to compute and predict the most likely location of the user (as in country/region) and lock down features accordingly.These are only some of the factors taken into the equation:
- GPS location
- Wi-Fi location
- Wi-Fi hotspot country codes
- Cellular/GSM country codes
- IP address
- Home and roaming operator regions
- Apple Account region
- Device region
- Satellite reachability
countryd
takes in all of these and more as input to provide the most likely country of the user. If that country is in the EU, then 💥 Sideloading, Default Apps, etc etc etc goodies