How to get a Canadian iTunes account

iPhone and iPad games sometimes launch early in specific regions – usually for those lucky ragamuffins living Canada, New Zealand or Australia. Many online-centric mobile games dance the staggered release routine to stress test servers and catch various other problems before launching in countries like the ol’ U.S. of A.

Not to fret, dear readers. Much like subsidized health insurance, you too can experience the same wonders as Canada just by setting up a spare Apple ID on your iDevice of choice with these few simple steps. These instructions will work on any free-to-play game in any country you may need, though Canada seems the region of choice for most developers.

1. First you’re going to need a fake Canadian address. You can use services like fakenamegenerator.com for this purpose. One important note is that you must either write this information down or open it on a separate device. If you switch to another app (like Safari) during the following steps, it will time out the process and you’ll have to start again.
2. Now open up the App Store and scroll on down to the bottom of the Featured category. On the bottom-left you should see a block labeled “Apple ID” next to your email address. Tap it and hit “sign out” to log out of your standard account.
3. That same block should now read “Sign In.” Tap it again and, rather than sign into your old account, hit “Create New Apple ID.” The dialog box will ask you to select a store region, at which point you can select Canada, Australia or New Zealand at your discretion. If you tap next, you’ll be taken to a Terms and Conditions page. DO NOT CONTINUE FROM HERE. Rather, cancel out of the procedure and return to the front page.
4. Creating a profile through the main menu requires a credit card or gift certificate from the appropriate region. Unless you have a Canadian’s wallet lying around, that does you no good. Luckily, many iOS games are free-to-play and won’t require such. If it is a paid game, you’ll have to lay hands on an App Store gift card from your desired region to purchase it.  Now that you’ve switched your region, search for the game and tap the “FREE” icon, then “Install.”
5. Trying to download the game will take you to the same dialog box for creating a new account as before. This time, however, you can select “None” as your payment option. From here just enter the information you generated from before, or make it up and pull the details from Google Maps. For your email address, you can use a spare account or, if you have a Gmail account, simply add a period anywhere inside of your address. Apple will count it as new, but you’ll actually still get any emails from them sent to that same account.

And that’s all there is to it! Once you’ve downloaded the game you can sign back in to your real account and still brag to all your friends about your ultra-rare, international import. Have fun!

Steven Strom

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Steven "The Future of Games Journalism" Strom plays entirely too much Dota 2. He sometimes plays games when he's not too busy writing about them and their place in our culture, and thinks maybe they're not just a fad after all.