Determine iPhone user's country

Question

I need to determine at startup what country a user is in, for an iPhone application. Presumably I will have to turn on location services and do some sort of reverse geocoding. I don't really want to use a third party web service if possible, are there any other suggestions for determining country from what location services provides?

Initially, I only need to check whether the user is inside the US or not, but this may change in the future to add more countries. I understand that location can not always be determined or the user may have location services turned off. Basically, I just need to know if the user is detected as being inside the US, in order to turn off a specific feature.

EDIT: On further reading, it looks like MKReverseGeocoder would be the way to go, except I don't wish to display any maps in my app, which means I'm not allowed to use this.

Answer 1

Another trick you can try is checking the carrier’s MCC:

#import <CoreTelephony/CTTelephonyNetworkInfo.h>
#import <CoreTelephony/CTCarrier.h>

CTTelephonyNetworkInfo *netInfo = [[CTTelephonyNetworkInfo alloc] init];
CTCarrier *carrier = [netInfo subscriberCellularProvider];
NSString *mcc = [carrier mobileCountryCode];