What are regional limitations? Windows Phone 7, iPhone, Android are all made a little different on a software level for each region of the world. When an update is released for Android, it might just be for European users and people in Asia might never get it. The same goes for the Android Market, it's binded to the region you're in. So if you live in Pakistan it will either choose Asia or Middle East as your location.
What is the disadvantage to that? I can't speak for Europeans or Americans, but if the Android Market is binded to Asia or Middle East, you will not be able to find many applications that people in other regions do. This is understandable for a few applications like Pandora. Pandora will not work in Pakistan so there is no reason for it to show in the market place here since it wont even work. However the list of applications that wont show up in this region is quite big and some names will leave you baffled. You wont be able to search for and download any Google Application like Maps, Gmail etc etc. You wont be able to download many weather applications and you wont be able to download Skype. Not being able to download Google apps is quite baffling to say the least. Why they would want to lock a region out of downloading their very own apps is downright confusing. There is a very simple solution to this and you will need a rooted phone.
- Download "marketenabler" from the market
- Force close "market" from the applications menu
- Open market enabler
- Go to settings list
- Choose "us T-Mobile" and click "fake this provider"
- All set and done!
Lets see if it works. First I'll try searching for Google Maps without using any market enabler. Here are the results:
931 results and no Google Maps.
Now lets try setting the region to "us T-Mobile" in marketenabler.
Now that thats done, lets search for Google Maps again:
There you have it. More than 1400 results and most importantly Google Maps is one of them.
You will now be able to update all your Google Apps whenever an update is available and you will be able to download apps that were otherwise not available.
