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Apple AirPods Pro 3 tricks for Canadians

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I am looking for advice, tips and tricks from any canadian that has managed to make AirPods Pro 2 or 3 work as . What did you do? Change your canadian Apple account to a US one? Use a VPN to set up the AirPods?

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I think you have to be close enough to the us for the system to say you’re in the us.

WH

I recently read a post by a user in Italy, where hearing aid functions for AirPods is restricted successfully get the function enabled by going into Vatican City where it is permitted and, once the switchover had been accomplished, successfully carry that function back into Italy proper. Maybe a quick cross-border foray is in order. Or, get far enough across the Ogdensburg Bridge to be within range of US cell towers.

I have been wondering about these silly geoblocking things- can’t you simply switch to a VPN while doing your setup?

In reply to @eliotb

Hi there

@eliotb said:

I recently read a post by a user in Italy, where hearing aid functions for AirPods is restricted successfully get the function enabled by going into Vatican City where it is permitted and, once the switchover had been accomplished, successfully carry that function back into Italy proper.

I can confirm what wrote 1 week ago. to activate the feature you, your iphone and your airpods have to be physically in a region where the feature is approved and once the feature is activated it still remain active once you go back to your region.

as i wote before, vatican city is inside the city i live (ROME) it means that there is a region inside another region. you can walk in Vatican city and still think you are in Rome until you check your gps position in your smartphone because there are no frontier, just police and security but not chek-point.

So what you have to do is to look in google maps and watch where is the region approved closest from you, go there to take a coffee, or a beer if you prefer and power off and on your phom, wait for the reboot and BOOOOM!!! you did the trick

to be clear and show you what i mean look at the picture:

Immagine

imagine you live in the house marked with the yellow point and the yellow cross(or in any other point in the map outside the yellow ring) you are in ROME,ITALY so you can’t benefit of the hearing aid feature of your airpods but…if today you have nothing to do, it’s a beautiful sunny day and you want to go out for a walk, no one forbids you to have a nice time in the yellow ring, inside the yellow ring, you are not in ITALY :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: but in Vatican City and you can take a coffe, take some fotos, restart your phone to enable the feature and thank the Lord. then you can go wherever you want and the hearing aid feature will follow you….I have to verify if the feature is still enabled after the next firmware update….in the worst case, i know what i have to do.

Cheers.

Thanks for replies. I have decided to buy the Airpods Pro 3 and try to activate the features. I will report back on what works and what does not.

In the mean time, I have found this thread from reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AirpodsPro/comments/1k0owus/hearing_aid_mode_in_canada_success/573

The solution proposed is quite technical but my husband says he can help me try. So we will see.

I would try a VPN first. You can very easily set this up on an iPad or iPhone using e.g. the free Tunnelbear app.

Did any of you apple nerds try out this speech in noise apple app beta? (With your airpods or your hearing aids)

Hearable Beta Announcement
Hey everyone, we have spent the last couple of months building some tech that filters speech from background noise. It’s called Hearable and works in a similar way to a remote microphone - but free and on your phone! You can connect it directly to your hearing aids, wired or bluetooth headphones and it will enhance speech whilst removing background noise in realtime. Today we are opening some spots for beta access to Hearable and we are excited to see how people find it! The models we have buil…

So far, I have tried a regular VPN (choosing a US location) while the cell is in airplane mode with wifi and bluetooth open and it did not work. I did not see the hearing aids features on my iPhone. This would have been to easy!

We will soon be ready for the full hack: we will “virtually” be on US soil. We will see if that works!

Use of VPN is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. As this week’s Comperactive magazine says: “Cheap or free services often recycle small pools of addresses, many of which are already blacklisted, making it far easier for sites to detect and block you.”

In reply to @Lou1582

I’ve read multiple posts and threads that have tried the VPN approach and say that this approach does not work. The AirPods seem to be using the phone location. @Dr_Dr_please reported his experience recently: Going to a location that is approved does the trick.

APPLE AirPods 3 PRO hearing aid feature trick
Good morning my friends, i have a pair of Airpods 3 Pro but unfortunately i can’t benefit of the hearing aid feature because i live in italy and here the feature is not activated. But…when i saw in the supported country page i read Vatican City is supported. So, i live in Rome, Vatican City is 20 minutes far from my home. The access to vatican City is free, you can walk around piazza San Pietro and other places with ease and without ask the permission to anyone. Do you think if I go to have a wa…
Edited

yes my friends and i can also tell you that upgrading to ios 26.2 on both iphone and airpods leave the fetuares in their place. So, atm, once you unlock the feature, this remains actived.

Cheers.

Success! Just this weekend I travelled from Vancouver to Victoria on Ferries. The first ~20 minutes of the voyage crosses US waters. The moment Apple Maps showed us crossing the border, the Hearing Assistance and Hearing Aid options appeared! Much too noisy on the ferry to do the hearing test, but I had saved a Mimi test and an audiologist ‘gram to Apple Health a while ago, so I chose one of those and activated the hearing aid function. Still active in Victoria, and back home in Vancouver.

So the key, as others have said, seems to be GPS… you must be physically in (or over, in a plane) a country that supports the feature.

Hope that helps!

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