Anyone work overseas while hiding their location from their employer... when their job is that of a mobile app developer?
I've done mostly web development and DevOps in my career. Some of my jobs have known that I was globe trotting. When the job market became bad, I found it was best to just tell recruiters I lived in my US state of residence (or else they would hang up the phone on me). Then I'd do the whole travel router setup / no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth / no work phone or Slack on phone thing, and I was able to pull this off for long stretches of time without being "caught", even though I also avoided jobs that I knew would definitely have an issue if they found out.
Anyway, lately, I've been focusing on just building my own stuff, with the goal of maybe supporting myself with my own apps, monetized mostly via mobile users. Was thinking, if I don't have any luck with this, it might be nice to at least just get a job as a mobile developer. If anything, that would extend my runway on my personal apps. But I have a lot of concerns about mobile app development literally being my job, while at the same time needing to hide my location.
When I did the above trickery for hiding my location, occasionally I would need a phone app for something like 2FA. I would use a cheap Android phone, plugged physically into my travel router via an ethernet cable (you can buy adapters on Amazon), that was in airplane mode all the time, with no SIM card. Anyway, I imagine this type of setup might be tough as a mobile developer? What if the app you're working on specifically relies on GPS, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi? I presume maybe they'd give you a company phone (can someone confirm that company phones are the norm for mobile dev jobs?), and in that case, there might be MDM. Anyone actually pull this off?
Just brainstorming a bit... there's a chance that literally all they track is the IP, which the above workaround would deal with. There are legal implications of an employer tracking your exact location without your consent, however, imagine the app you're looking on requires location permissions and puts your location in the database... people could see your location in the dev database. What about the idea of only testing your app on a simulator / VM? Maybe it's not super great, but in some apps, it might be doable. Or what about only testing on a device farm? Maybe convince your job you would prefer to to test your own code using something like BrowserStack... or if you want to do something borderline unethical, just sign up for your own subscription?
Open to thoughts on this, but especially, if anyone has experience hiding their location as a mobile dev.
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