This is so true. We moved to another country and changing everything from my location in the google play store (requires a form of payment from the new country) to opening a second PayPal account with another email was painful. I still think the change of cell phone numbers was the worst. It seems the assumption with all applications is that we will be born and die with the same number now. I will have to memorialize my cell number on my tombstone.
How would you expect global number portability to work when each country more or less has their own country code and unique numbering plan?
A US to Canada or vice versa move would work since they’re on the same system, but a UK number, for instance, doesn’t even have the same digits of numbers necessarily, and even if they’re both 10, they’re completely different formats.
Yes.. It is near impossible to change a phone number for most accounts. My US banks would not allow for the same amount of digits as my European phone number had. Wiring money from my own accounts wanted to send a 4 digit pin to my US number which would not work in France. You seem to imply that in 2023, we are not capable of making a banking application accept more than one format of phone number. And the fact that google cannot figure out I live in another country (and I have to enter a bank card with address in an app store or else I am blocked from certain apps) is laughable.
I mean, why would a bank care about phone numbers outside of the country it serves? Do you expect a US bank to recognize the number systems of every single one of the 195 countries out there when 99.9% of their customers live in one? Do you expect a French one? An Ethiopian one? Banks are explicitly not global businesses, they are generally national at the largest. It's not like they lose a whole lot of business if they don't support it; it's an edge case at best.
And Google certainly knows you are currently in a new country, but you could be there temporarily visiting, on a temporary residence, or have moved. How would you expect Google to know that? You likely also have to accept new Terms based on the country you move to, and there are more than likely fraud policies in place specifically to prevent people abusing a system like that to get lower pricing. The required step is there as policy, not a technical necessity.
Not OP, but I think they mean changing their mobile number setting inside of their online accounts is impossible. When they moved, they got a new number format but their existing account won’t let them change the format.
