Shopping on Google Play
While the App Store on iOS allows you to pay for purchases using your mobile balance, the Google Play app store does not. To pay the subscription fee or purchase the desired app, you need to get a foreign debit card and change the region of your Google account profile.
It is important that you use a VPN. Also map region, profile and VPN must match.
This isn’t the easiest way, but for most games and apps, in-app purchases are only available through Google Play.
Changing the region is as follows: you need to open Google Play, click on the profile icon in the upper right corner, select the section “Payments and subscriptions” – “Payment methods” – “Other payment settings”. If you have old data active in this menu, you should delete it. When there is not a single entry in this section, you can add new data by clicking the “Add payment method” button.
It is important to enter the address in the data fields in the country where the card is registered. For example, if this is a card of a Kazakh bank, you will need to enter an address in Kazakhstan – this may even be the central square of Astana.
Then you need to open Google Play, click on the profile icon and select the section “Settings” – “General” – “Account and device settings” and find the “Country and profiles” menu. There you need to enter the details of a foreign card and click on the “Add debit card” button.
It is possible to shop with gift cards for users who do not have a foreign card. But in this case, you need to be prepared to overpay, on average, 50% of the amount received. So, for example, on popular online sites you can find gift cards of 25 Turkish lira for 145 rubles, but at the current rate 25 pounds cost 100 rubles. There are also American cards. For example, a card with a face value of 10 USD will cost 1.3 thousand rubles, but at the exchange rate its price is 760 rubles. In the latter case, the overpayment has already almost doubled.
In addition, do not forget about the risks of encountering scammers who will not issue any cards after receiving the advance.
If you have a gift card, to activate it you need to open Google Play, go to “Payments and subscriptions” – “Redeem gift code”, enter the code from the purchased card. It is also important to enable the region-specific VPN for the gift card during this process.
Gift card funds can be used to purchase games, apps and subscriptions.
Alternative stores
In addition to Google Play for Android, there are dozens of other popular app stores, including RuStore and Huawei’s AppGallery.
Particular attention should be paid to the AppGallery store, as it has a large number of popular games and applications for purchase. To do this, you just need to link the card in the profile settings and only then pay for the desired service or product.
RuStore is a slightly newer store, but it’s constantly updated with new games and apps. Linking a bank card also takes place in the section “Profile” – “User” – “Payment methods”. Here you can use the SberPay service, Sber ID cards or any other bank card.
contactless payment
There are two ways to pay for purchases made in offline stores on Android in a contactless way – using QR codes or by touching the device to the terminal.
There are several services for this, including Mir Pay, SberPay, and SBPey.
To use Mir Pay, it is enough to download the application from any convenient store, enter the details of the bank card of the MIR payment system and pay for the purchases made in the stores by bringing the smartphone to the terminal.
SBPay works similarly but this service also supports contactless payment by scanning QR codes which can be useful in some cases. For example, some stores offer various promotions with this payment method to increase sales using QR code.
Contactless payment in the SberPay service is available to all users of the SberBank application on Android. To connect contactless payment, you need to open a mobile bank, select the item “All accounts and cards” on the main page, go to the “Useful” section and select the option “SberPay – payment by phone”. On the screen that opens, you plan to pay for your purchases by choosing the card you want from the MIR payment system.
Among other things, SberPay not only allows payment for purchases in stores, but also helps to make purchases securely in many Russian online services. For example, when buying something in an online store or paying for a subscription in Russian services, you do not need to enter your bank card details – just choose SberPay as the payment method.