Here's the issue.

I'm trying to help my friend. He's from a country where Gemini is not available.

He's fully updated and he has the latest version of iOS.

We've installed some VPN service. It's working properly and shows Netherlands. All fine. IPv6 is disabled. Tested with myip dot com and ipleak dot net. No sign of the home country. Just to make things clear.

As soon as he opens google.com in a private Safari tab it detects his home country. Gemini fails to open - says "your country is unsupported".

What we've tried:

    Disabling Apple Relay

    Disabling geolocation services globally

    Enabling Fly Mode

    Changing the OS language to English, the local language was completely removed

    Changing the timezone to Amsterdam

    Changing the region to Netherlands

    Deleting all keyboards except US English

    Cleaning the browser data

    Playing with DNS

    Restarting the device having done all of above.

Google.com continues to show their native country in Safari's private mode. Chrome does the same. So does Firefox.

For fun I gave my friend my device (an Android) which is fully localized, everything points at my country, including the SIM card, timezone, language, etc. - opened a private tab in Chrome while using VPN - the VPN country was detected. My friend then could log in into Google and use Gemini.

Somehow iOS willingly leaks some of the device's Google data to google.com.

"A privacy oriented company" they said.

I hate Apple.