For a company like Google, i certainly expected them to have an easy switch option to change my country and then verify the new country using my IP or my last few google sign in locations! But no, this task is not straightforward at all! I just moved to the US from India and signed into my new android device using the ID i had created back home, only to realise that it would default to the Indian play store and there was absolutely no setting to change this to USA. I figured it was because of the payments methods I had set up, I went ahead and removed all the payment methods saved on my account! Next I changed all the addresses to the new address in US, cleared cache and data. No use, the play store still wouldn’t update to US!
Lots of searching online and trying multiple funny things turned out to be useless, the play store just wouldn’t budge! Finally I figured what it needed! So for all the peeps moving to a new country, this might help. Follow these steps
- Remove all payment systems from your google wallet account [if they are bound to your previous country]
- Change all addresses [physical addresses] to a location in the new country.
- Open Play Store, open any paid app and click on buy!
- On the add payment page, close the app store.
- Open play.google.com on your computer, and move to an app you know is available only in your new country
- It will magically be compatible
- Now open play store on your phone, it would have updated
I am not kidding! You don’t need to add a new card, nor do you have to purchase anything! Just follow the steps given above and you will be good to go!
For example, google wallet is not available in India, but it is in USA.
Aadi's Blog 