How To Download An App That's Not Available In Your Country

region restricted

When I first learned about Spotify, I was really excited. Here was this music streaming service that seemed to have all of the features and functions that I wanted.

You can imagine my frustration when I came to learn that the developers of Spotify had made it a region restricted application. In short, it was not available for download in my country.

However, I didn't give up. Instead, I found a couple of workarounds where you can manage to install any compatible app or game on your Android device. Yes, this means even if the developer has made their app restricted to select regions.

Here are a few ways to install Android region restricted apps or games to your device, particularly if they are not available in your country at all.

Option One: VPN

A VPN app will help you to mask your location and trick the Google Play Store into believing that you are from a different physical location different from your actual location.

There are a lot of Android VPN apps available which let you change your location to a different country. The only trick is figuring out which market the app or game you want to download is officially available and to mimic or spoof the location.

As part of this tutorial, I have used the Express VPN app which is a popular VPN app with options to manually or automatically connect to an optimal location.

Step 1

Download and Install the Express VPN app or any other VPN app of your choice from the Google Play Store on your Android device.

Step 2

Now open the Express VPN app or the one you downloaded and then select the location where the app or game you want to install is officially available.

For this tutorial, I have used the Pandora Music app which also happens to be unavailable in my country but is officially available in the US. So, I have selected the location as the United States in the Express VPN app.

region restricted

Step 3

Open the Settings app on your device and go to Apps and select Google Play Store from the list. Tap on storage and then select the clear data and clear cache options from the app.

Now go back to the main page of the app, often the one just before where you are now, and select force stop to stop the app from running.

Step 4

Once you have completed the above step, on your phone search for the app you want to install on Google Play and then click on the associated Google Play Store link from the search results. This will launch the Play Store on your device.

Now the app page on the Google Play Store will be opened and you will have the option to install the app on your device even if it is not officially available at your region. Thanks for the help, VPN!

Method Two – Sideload an APK file

If you are not willing to install a separate VPN app in order to install a region restricted app or game on your device, then you might be interested in knowing about this method.

Using this method, you can just install any region restricted app that is unavailable in your country to your device, without having to install any third party VPN app. Perhaps you don't fully trust the apps or experience just yet.