USA iPhone 6 Plus stuck in the Australian App Store

I took my iPhone to Australia in February 2020 and needed/wanted to purchase an Aussie campground app called WikiCamps, but Apple makes switching countries extremely difficult, almost impossible even for their own experts. So I took the phone to an Apple store near Sydney, and after THREE HOURS of the staff there AND one fellow somewhere on the other end of a phone line trying to figure out how to enable me to buy the app, it was finally accomplished. I had to buy an Aussie gift card in cash at the store because some Einstein at Apple has decided that American credit cards shouldn’t work in Australia, and finally by loading the gift card deep down in some Iphone hieroglyphic menu rabbit hole I don’t remember, and futzing around for what seemed like forever to change the address to an Aussie one, I was eventually able to download the app and continue my journey to Melbourne. That lovely app more than paid for itself on my first night out, too.

Now I have been back home in the USA since late March of 2020 and *apparently* because there is still nine cents Australian remaining on the gift card, the phone cannot be switched back to the USA so I can make USA purchases and update my American-only apps that are unavailable on the Aussie App Store. Wouldn’t you think that Apple would make spending money in their App Stores super easy? Nope! Somebody at Apple has decided to make it as difficult as they can, but they are NOT going to make me waste another three hours of my life a second time, I’ll ditch this horrible iPhone and get an Android phone of some kind before that happens.

The LOGICAL thing would be to create a second Apple account with a USA address and different email and then just login to it on the iPhone, but Apple’s policy of not warning people about the traps they’ve set to surprise you when you make ANY kinds of changes has deterred me from doing that. Also the experience of trying to login a few years back with a different account on an old iPhone 4, which literally took MONTHS of attempts before it would work, tells me that would be a really dumb thing to try. SO PLEASE DON’T REPLY WITH THAT POOR SOLUTION. There has to be some way to switch countries cleanly and easily, and since I intend to visit Australia again I do not want to lose my Aussie apps or suffer any other unpleasant surprises that Apple has set up as traps for me to discover the hard way.

Your help would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately since I’m writing this on my iPhone, and the geniuses at Apple have provided no way to bookmark or copy the URL of this Help page, there’s no way back here to check for replies, so I have to hope I’ll get an email about it.