[oscillon]

It’s a UK based news app so can’t see them doing “regionalised” news alerts… Unless they do a BBC World News app but I think it’s just the main News app they have.

Well, the web version of BBC News is regional specific - it is bbc.co.uk/news, if you are inside the UK, and bbc.com/news, with international stories, if you are outside. The two versions redirect you to one another depending on where you are.

May be, this is the case with the apps as well - one avaliable only inside the UK, along with, for example, iPlayer, and the other available overseas? At least, there are 2 distinct apps in Google Play:
one by BBC Media App Technologies (play.google.com ), with the identifier "bbc.mobile.news.uk" (which kind of suggests that it is the UK version)
and another one, still with the old logo, by BBC Studios Limited (play.google.com ), with the identifier "bbc.mobile.news.ww" ('ww' - most likely stands for "Worldwide").

In this case, it is likely that this app separation will continue even after the merger of the channels.

UPD. ALV was a little faster!

Maybe someone here with a VPN can try install both versions of the app and tell us the differences in push alerts~

It does not take just VPN to circumvent geo-restrictions, at least in Google Play - you also have to manually change the region of your account and, may be, disable geopositioning as well.