App Store and iCloud users in India should soon be able to subscribe using credit or debit cards again, as Apple tries to smooth the way to launching Apple Pay.
Starting in June 2022, India introduced extra banking laws regarding any online recurring payments, such as subscriptions, and Apple ceased accepting any debit or credit cards in the country. The company said at the time only that it was because of banking regulations and that users would have to switch to India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Now according to Indian financial publication Moneycontrol, Apple is testing credit and debit card options with a limited number of users. Reportedly, the intention is to roll it out across India in the next few months.
The extended regulations were approved by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and required changes to how cards operated. For any recurring payment, banks have to notify users 24 hours in advance, for instance, and allow them to cancel it.
Plus India uses what the RBI calls a card tokenization framework. Neither merchants nor payment platforms can store a user's card details, and instead they must use encrypted tokens issued by local banks in India.
Storing those tokens in India instead of the user's card details in the US would have required Apple to alter its systems, but it appears to be a relatively clear requirement. Much less clear in 2022 was how the RBI began requiring companies like Apple to use India's own Aadhaar biometric ID system.
That would mean each time a user made a payment, it would have to be confirmed via this online system, rather than on-device. As AppleInsider noted in 2022, both Google Pay and Samsung Wallet complied with the new law rather than cease taking card payments.
What's changed
All of this was enough that Apple decided to just drop card payments entirely. That will presumably have hurt its revenues, but it definitely inconvenienced existing Indian users who had to swap to the UPI system to keep accessing their data.
Apple obviously thought that inconvenience was a short-term hit, and anyway that new users would just sign up via UPI. Doubtlessly it calculated the odds on what revenue it could lose, and figured it was acceptable.
That would only change if fewer new users signed up via UPI than Apple projected. It's likely that Apple would have just continued refusing card payments.
Even opening its first physical retail stores in the country from 2023 didn't make Apple change its position.
Opened in 2023, Apple BKC in Mumbai was the first Apple Store in India - image credit: Apple
But what probably did have an impact is how Apple's decade-long ambition to launch Apple Pay in India finally looks like it will happen. Strong rumors began in January 2026, and by February there were reports of the specific banks Apple was negotiating with.
It's not known yet whether these banks are the ones now said to be testing card payments for Apple. But the testing fits in with how Apple was said to be aiming to launch Apple Pay by around the middle of 2026.
Apple Pay launched in the US in 2014, and Apple has been working to bring it to India since at least 2018. "We absolutely want to bring Apple Pay to the market," Eddy Cue said then when discussing India.
The now almost decade-long effort to launch Apple Pay in India was initially blocked by how the RBI was requiring firms to store their data within India. Although Apple had already done that with China, it entails setting up partnerships within the country.
If it's correct that Apple is now testing card payments in India, it presumably means it has partnered with at least some banks. It also must mean that it is complying with the RBI's regulations.
Apple's motivation for finally working with the RBI is clear enough. It's that India has a population of around 1.4 billion people, and as recently as 2024, Apple's iPhone represented just 6% of the smartphone market there.
So there is enormous potential for growth, and Apple Pay will make that easier. If the cost of getting Apple Pay into India is that the company must restore card payments, Apple has clearly decided that's worth doing.
