Design Your Digital App For International Customers

While traveling internationally I recently discovered just how fragile our digital infrastructure is. Too many companies tie their digital apps to a specific country. If you're an app product manager, don't reduce your target market by restricting it to a single country or region. Even if your app is specific to a country, design your app to support any customer traveling into your country.

Because I'm in the UK for several weeks, I decided to buy a UK SIM for my iPhone so I wouldn't need to pay for international roaming. At just ten pounds per month for 30GB of data, pay-as-you-go monthly plans from services like VOXI can be substantially more cost-effective for international travelers to the UK and Europe. However, adding a new international sim card has dramatic impact on your digital life.?

One advantage of a UK SIM card is I have a new UK phone number on my phone. This makes it easier for friends and colleagues in the UK to call on a local UK number. But, as I soon discovered, my iPhone won't keep my old USA number for longer than 30 days once the SIM card is swapped out. That's probably OK if you're only out of country for a week or two, but not useful if you're traveling for more than a month.

Today's digital life requires we connect many services to our phones for ID verification. Swapping numbers isn't easy, and swapping to an international number could cause all sorts of issues. To avoid losing access to services tied to my US phone number, I opted to insert my US SIM into an old iPhone I carry as backup. While it has my US cellular carrier tied to the SIM, if I leave it with cellular services turned off, I can avoid massive roaming charges. I can still use the phone on WiFi, and importantly, Apple will now keep my US number on my Apple ID.

If you don't happen to have a spare phone, it may be worth buying a cheap one because most credit cards and financial services now use two-factor authentication. If you have 2FA setup to send a message to your phone, without access to text messages on your old number, you will be unable to verify your account (something you typically have to do at least once while travelling). Note: This is a good reason to use authentication apps (e.g. Microsoft Authenticator) for 2FA in place of a mobile number.

Do Regional Settings Block Access To Your Firm’s Apps?

It wasn't till I went to Costa Coffee to buy coffee that I discovered the biggest challenge to using a phone registered for a region that's not my current location. My phone is registered with Apple using my Apple ID. My ID is tied to North America as my region. On searching the app store I found numerous Costa apps from many countries, except the one in the UK (see image).

It seems many apps are only visible in the Apple App Store to phones registered to the same region. Does this mean some of my existing apps on my phone are also tied to my US region – how would I know?

By limiting region availability, product managers may be attempting to make compliance with the various privacy rules easier (like GDPR in the EU for example).

Since there is an option on the iPhone to change your region, you might think that this is simply a matter of of a phone user selecting a new region in order to load apps for that region. Not so fast!

When I tried to change my phone region to the UK, I discovered I would need to first cancel all of my current Apple subscriptions.

Since I'm expecting to be in the UK for a number of weeks, I did seriously consider this. But as I brought my Apple TV with me, and I listen to Apple music a lot on my phone, and I have my entire digital experience tied to my Apple account, I really don't feel like canceling subscriptions just to be able to load UK-only apps. What's more, if I change my region, I have no way of knowing which of my existing digital services will remain supported. Will my iCloud subscription still work? How about my Microsoft OneDrive subscription? Given all of the challenges surrounding where data is stored based upon where a customer is located, it's possible many of my existing app subscriptions will no longer work after changing my region. Is that a risk I'm willing to take?

And it's not just Costa UK's app that isn't supported if your region is not the UK. It turns out Morrison's supermarket only lets customers get discounts through it's app – and I can't load their app either, because it's not available in my region!

Since many other UK apps are freely available to me to load from the App store, including, for example, the NHS app to access healthcare services from the National Health Services, and Shop&GO automated checkout app from Aldi, the decision to restrict app access appears to be a choice made by app product managers. By opting to restrict access to the app to a specific region, digital product managers block anyone who may be visiting the region. This may make compliance easier, but it creates for a very poor customer experience, especially if your business model is pushing customers toward digital experiences.

One option is to submit your app for use in all countries/regions when uploading it to Apple. Another is to design the app to work differently based on the country selected by the customer.

Has Amazon Solved This For Their App?

If you’re a digital product manager and haven’t figured this all out yet,?take heart ... (Continued at FenwickFutures.com)