What is an IP address and why is my iPhone asking me for my country?

If you are using a VPN, your IP address may be showing an area different from your actual location. Some websites or services are only available to a person in a certain region. Your IP address does not show your actual location, but it does show a general area such as a city that that your network request is coming from. Some people falsely believe they need a VPN to hide their IP address for security. This is only a marketing campaign used by some VPN companies. It is important to note that all of your website data and website searches is being sent to the VPN company unprotected. Some of those companies will sell your data to advertisers for an additional income stream.

To get back to your questions, an IP address is assigned to you by your Internet Service Provider. A website needs this address to know where to send the data you have requested from a website. As for why your iPhone is asking you for your country, we would need to know when this is happening or what app you are using. The apps/services you can use on your phone depends on the region you used to set up your phone. That does not mean you can simply change the region on your device to use apps/services that would otherwise not be available to you.

Wrmhrtd714 wrote:

What is an IP address and why is my iPhone asking me for country?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Your iPhone has various IP addresses that identify it to the network, much like a telephone number identifies a phone or a modem that you can call.

Your ISP will assign an address to your router / gateway / firewall box, and that same box will use a second IP address on your internal network.

Your iPhone would not normally be asking about IP addresses and countries, not past an unusually manual network setup process, but some add-on app or service might. An add-on VPN might prompt for that, though.

What’s the context for the prompt?

Here's a link that explains it all. https://us.norton.com/blog/privacy/what-is-an-ip-address