Pardon me if this is a basic question but surprised I couldn't find more details regarding it.

What prevents an end user to either buy a japanese vpn and use that to connect to the app store.

I doubt that a vpn running itself inside an ios phone itself would work out of the box but what about if its running at a router level or lets say I use a vpn on another phone and use it to create a hotspot to connect to in an ios phone.

Don't things like these basically allow these rules to effectively break the ios monopoly.

Or think about it this way, lets say I go to japan and install an third party app store and then go back to some other country, would the 3rd party app store still work?

I am also wondering about what mechanism can be used which can make a third party store work in the first place, I know of IOS jailbreaks so would it be similar to it, how would they detect that its in "japan"

Or would these work at a hardware level? That a phone sold in japan would have such features, if that would be the case, I would assume it would increase the values of such phones.

I would appreciate it if people could tell me more about what's the case and answer my questions.

Here are people documenting what they had to do for this, in both cases it necessitated the use of Faraday cages:

https://downrightnifty.me/blog/2025/02/27/eu-features-outsid...

https://lagrangepoint.substack.com/p/airpods-hearing-aid-hac...

If it’s like for other region-locked features, you’ll need a Japanese Apple account (formerly Apple ID), which likely means a Japanese payment method and/or billing address, and you need to set your iPhone region to Japan. Furthermore, whatever Apple uses for geolocation (it will include mobile cell and wifi metadata) needs to not indicate a location outside of Japan most of the time.

A VPN doesn’t cut it.

there's an entire daemon dedicated to making sure you're not trying to bypass apple's business model, using every phone sensor possible

just a VPN alone won't fool it

Open a terminal on your Mac and type `man 8 countryd`. Apple documents the daemon for determining your country.