Oh I don’t doubt it’s a hassle. But you are paying the bank/insurance company, outside of Apple’s payment system, and they’re the ones refusing you international service, right? Have you tried calling them up to get support while traveling and ask why they’re blocking other countries, or ask if they offer other ways to authenticate and get in?
It might be nice for you if Apple refused to let devs build region locked apps, but that might cause other bigger problems for other people, right? For banking, hacking attempts from other countries in general is a big and serious issue. My banking app offers a region locking option for my own security, and I’m sure many banks can safely assume that login attempts from other countries are illegitimate.
> Have you tried calling them up to get support while traveling and ask why they’re blocking other countries, or ask if they offer other ways to authenticate and get in?
The trouble with that is you might need to buy a region-compatible sim card to call the bank, and you might need to call the bank in order to buy the sim card. (I was lucky I could find wifi and had a VPN set up so I could make myself appear in the US).
> My banking app offers a region locking option for my own security
This is a different thing, though - a region lock on logins might be useful.
What these companies are doing is only region locking installation. If you already have the app installed, you can use it from overseas just fine
(and you can generally setup an arbitrary-region Google/Apple account over a VPN, so the scammers just work around it that way).