How iOS Restricts Features by Region: A Look at MobileGestalt and Eligibility
As agreed by many reviewers, the iPhone 16 series launched this year in a curiously “hollow” state: the heavily touted Apple Intelligence won’t be enabled until iOS 18.1 in October, and even then, it won’t be available to users in mainland China and the European Union. Indeed, this is just the latest example of iPhone features being fragmented by region. Against the increasingly complex landscape of global regulation, the differences in feature sets across regional variants of the iPhone have become so pronounced that they almost seem like different phones.
To opine on the practice I have no interest. Apple is a for-profit that is capable of and responsible for its own decisions of whether and how to comply. On the other hand, users can vote with their wallets. What’s more intriguing to me, though, is how Apple manages this growing set of regional feature restrictions. Below are some brief and preliminary notes of my research based on available information for the perusal of readers with similar interests in the topic. Due to my limited knowledge of iOS development and forensics, errors and omissions may be inevitable, and corrections are welcome.
In short, two components in the current version of iOS, MobileGestalt and Eligibility, are mainly responsible for implementing regional feature restrictions:
