Can't download Spotify android app

[Josephhansen002]

Hello,

About a month ago I installed Spotify for the first time when I was still in the States, but now I have moved to South Africa. Recently I did a factory reset on my phone, removing all the apps. When I tried to reinstall Spotify, Google Play gave me an error: "This item is not available in your country" (see attached). I tried using VPNs (RocketVPN and Tunnelbear), but my knowledge of VPNs is very limited and all of my attempts failed. 

I browsed through other forums where people have had the same problem and I came across this one from 5 years ago: Can't download app from Play Store

In here, a link to an APK was given, but upon clicking on it, noting happened. 

As I said before, I have been using it for about a month and it is a fantastic app, which why I do not want to lose it. 

If there is anyway to solve this problem, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance! 

[Joe · Accepted solution]

You can download the .apk from Spotify here but it will not update automatically so it's better to download from Play. Just set your VPN to a country where spotify is available such as UK or USA and you should be able to download from Play.

[Josephhansen002]

Thank you Joe.

Regarding the VPN, I connected to all the countries where Spotify is available and every time I got the same error. I followed this article word for word (and others like it) and it still didn't work. I tried clearing Google Play's data and cache and forcably stopping the service from android settings and it still did not work. (Screenshots attached).

The APK will work for now, but it would be best to get from the Play Store as you said. Since it worked in the articles and not for me, could it have something to do with the way my Google Account is set up?

Thanks again.

[Joe]

The steps in that post should work for everyone so I'm not sure why it didn't work for you. Your Google account settings shouldn't matter as this method doesn't use it. Sorry I can't help you more with this. I'll probably get shot anyway for suggesting using a VPN to get round country restrictions 🙂

[donpatrice]

I don't think that this is a solution for two reasons. First the download link seems to provide an outdated version. Second there are people out there without a google account.