Apple began a phased rollout of card payments for Apple Account purchases in India in early July 2026, ending a suspension that had been in place since May 2022. Eligible Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards are now accepted for App Store purchases, iCloud+, Apple Music, and other Apple subscriptions, with RuPay support planned as a subsequent phase, per Hindustan Times.

The original suspension traced directly to the Reserve Bank of India's recurring payments framework, introduced in 2021 and implemented in stages. That framework imposed mandatory additional authentication for recurring card transactions, required tokenized card credentials at the merchant level, and barred merchants from storing raw card details on their own infrastructure. The compliance burden was substantial: Apple, like a number of other global digital platforms, pulled card support rather than immediately retrofit its billing systems to meet the new requirements. From May 2022 onward, Indian users were left with UPI, net banking, and Apple Account balance as their only payment options for Apple's digital ecosystem.

Four years is a long time to leave a friction point in place, particularly in a market Apple has publicly prioritized. According to TechCrunch, a person familiar with the matter confirmed Apple made the necessary backend changes to bring its billing infrastructure in line with the RBI framework — tokenization, re-authentication flows, and the removal of stored card data from Apple's own systems. Apple updated its support documentation to reflect the restored option and, consistent with its standard practice, did not respond to a request for comment.

The timeline is worth examining. The RBI framework's core requirements — tokenization via card networks and AFA (Additional Factor of Authentication) for recurring mandates — were not unique to India in their intent, but the specific implementation, including the e-mandate registration flow through card networks and banks, required platform-level integration that goes well beyond a configuration change. The fact that it took Apple until mid-2026 to complete the work either reflects the genuine complexity of adapting a global billing stack to a single market's regulatory plumbing, the relative priority India held internally, or both.

Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, noted that Apple's services business in India maintained double-digit growth throughout the four-year gap, buoyed by UPI Autopay adoption and net banking. UPI Autopay, which Apple's own support documentation lists as a supported subscription method, has become a genuinely capable recurring-payment rail in India — low friction for users already embedded in the UPI ecosystem. That the services business grew anyway is useful context: the card payment gap was a constraint, not a ceiling.

Still, card payments carry distinct advantages for a segment of Apple's Indian user base. Premium subscribers — the demographic most likely to stack iCloud+ storage tiers, Apple One bundles, or AppleCare+ — tend to be heavy credit card users for whom UPI-based mandates may be an extra step rather than a native habit. Restoring card support removes a conversion-layer friction point for exactly the cohort Apple most wants to retain and grow.

The RuPay extension is worth watching. RuPay is the National Payments Corporation of India's homegrown card network, and its inclusion in the roadmap signals that Apple is not treating this as a minimal-viable compliance exercise but as a fuller market integration. RuPay's tokenization infrastructure has matured considerably, and its inclusion would extend card payment coverage to a significantly broader slice of the Indian cardholder base.

The Apple Pay question remains open. Reuters reported in February 2026, citing Bloomberg News, that Apple was in active discussions with Indian banks and global card networks about launching Apple Pay in the country. Apple has made no announcement on that front. The restoration of card payments for Apple Account purchases is a separate, narrower capability — it does not constitute an Apple Pay launch, and the two should not be conflated. What it does do is establish the tokenization and authentication infrastructure that any Apple Pay deployment would also require, which may make the eventual path shorter.

India's digital payments regulatory environment has always been more demanding than most markets Apple operates in, and the RBI has shown no sign of loosening its stance on data storage or authentication requirements. What changed here is that Apple built to meet those requirements rather than work around them. For the roughly 1.4 billion people in the market, the immediate change is practical and immediate: a wider set of payment methods, available now.