Play Store and the country pain

Question

I had already a lot of trouble with the play store country change in Canada. Now I'm living for a while in Singapore and I have the same trouble again.

In Canada/USA I was not able to download the online banking app of my bank RBC and the service app of my phone carrier Virgin because I couldn't change my country in the play store. Now I have the same trouble in Singapore. Bank accounts are here not easy to get (a lot of paper work) and will cost money. That totally blocks me from downloading free service apps. I only have one bank account in Germany for my credit card and all payments and I want to keep it like that. I don't want to pay for other bank accounts, credit cards or want to manage different bank accounts in many countries and currencies. I don't even want to talk about the hustle with the tax office. That was already enough with the one Canadian bank account.

Is there another way to change the play store country then to open a bank account with credit card in every country you're staying? It's really a pain in the ass.

Is the Apple AppStore the same pain or is it worth to change if you are an expat changing your locations frequently?

Answer 1

How about just creating a new Google account for this purpose and adding it to the phone. You will obviously not need a payments profile to download the free apps. But I believe you can still create a payments profile and use your existing card (German, Canadian) in the new account. Or better just buy Google Play gift cards (the offline scratchable ones). It is very easy to switch the account within Play Store. So, that won't hurt much. That's the only solution I can think of. I have already had a lot of pain to revert my account country from Canada to India. Because a lot of my apps were showing as unavailable.