using heytap app market globally

something i've been curious about for a bit is the oppo heytap app market. it's part of oppo cloud/heytap services, and is documented as being china-only. though, in recent times it has expanded to a limited extent. notably, to india.

the standard APK you'll find when looking for "heytap app market APK" on google or wherever will typically be said chinese version. shockingly, the app is in chinese.

the version for india, however, is primarily in english. you can discern an india version by checking if the version name is suffixed with _IN. off the bat, it looks mostly like the chinese version.

thing is, it shouldn't.

plenty of bugs are here. search doesn't work, many apps that should be on app market lead to 404 errors (even some featured apps do!) and an abnormally small selection of featured apps in some tabs.

the reason for this is actually quite simple, and it's that your phone is just set to the wrong region. you must have your phone's entire region set to india...which is a shitty requirement and considering you're changing a global, system-wide setting, is bound to cause random, weird issues. your date format is changed, forced to 24-hr (though you can change this back) and some apps prompt to change the region.

you can't even correct the date format. clearly, this is a terrible solution.

though it's not all terrible. once you switch regions, the whole app basically changes.

here's the IN region layout.

search works, and the whole layout changes too. you can access the full library too.

perhaps i might crack open the APK and try to patch it to always request IN region from the server, but knowing oppo, they probably have some crappy anti-tamper software inside this thing to prevent exactly what i'm trying to do.

or maybe they don't, sometimes they lazy out in random places.