Apple was able to make it work in most "developed" countries (do we have a better term for these countries now?). I guess they're just better at the regulatory game?
Also why would regulations prevent them from operating in Alaska, for example? I'm sure the Alaskan government would be happy to provide better emergency connectivity, highly doubt regulation is the issue. People are already being rescued, this here happened in 2022:
Google presumably uses Skylo, and that's only available in some regions.
I believe they currently only use Terrestar-1 and Terrestar-2, with Inmarsat to follow some time this year for almost global coverage.
Terrestar-1 covers the lower 48 US states with one spot beam, and Alaska and Hawaii with another one each, but I believe the latter two ones are relatively new, so maybe Google isn't using these yet?
I suspect this because I've used a Motorola Defy Satellite Link for the past year, which uses IoT-NTN just like the Pixel's baseband, and it's only been available in Europe and the lower 48 at launch (i.e. also with Hawaii and Alaska missing).
It's available in 17 countries so far. That's a long shot from "all developed countries" by most metrics.
And this really does seem to be largely due to regulations (and probably also integration with local emergency services), as there is no geographic pattern to availability.
