Apple is letting customers in India use credit and debit cards to pay for App Store apps, Apple Music subscriptions, and iCloud storage again. The company had stopped accepting card payments in May 2022, forcing Indian users to rely on other methods like payment apps or bank transfers. As of early July 2026, Visa and Mastercard are back as payment options, with support for RuPay — India's homegrown card network — coming later.

Why Apple pulled card payments in the first place

In 2021, India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), created new rules for how digital companies handle recurring payments from cards. Think of recurring payments like a monthly subscription: your card gets charged automatically each month. The RBI wanted stronger protections for customers, so it required companies to tokenize card information — essentially replacing the actual card number with a secure code — and to make sure customers re-authenticate, or confirm their identity, before each transaction. The RBI also forbade companies from storing raw card data on their own servers.

Apple, like several other tech companies, decided it was easier to stop accepting cards than to rebuild its payment system to meet these new rules. For four years, Indian Apple users were left with UPI (a popular mobile payment app), net banking, or Apple Account balance as their only ways to pay.

Why the four-year gap matters

Adapting Apple's global billing system to work with India's specific requirements was genuinely complicated work. The company had to redesign how it handles card data, add new authentication flows, and remove any stored card details from its own servers. It took until mid-2026 for Apple to finish those changes and get them approved.

The wait does raise a question worth noting: either Apple was working through a genuinely tricky technical problem, or the Indian market was not prioritized as urgently as other regions — or both. Apple has said India is important to its plans, so the four-year gap is longer than you might expect.

Apple's services still grew anyway

During the four years without card payments, Apple's subscription business in India — apps, music, cloud storage, and other services — grew at double-digit rates. That happened largely because UPI Autopay, a subscription feature built into India's popular payment app, became a solid alternative. Many Indians already use UPI for everyday payments, so setting up a subscription through it felt natural. The missing card option was a friction point, but not a dealbreaker for most users.

However, customers who regularly use credit cards likely felt the gap more sharply. These are often the same people who pay for multiple Apple subscriptions or buy premium features like extra iCloud storage or AppleCare+. For them, card payments offer a simpler path than UPI or bank transfers. Restoring card support removes an extra step for the customers Apple most wants to keep and attract.

What comes next

The next phase is RuPay support. RuPay is India's state-backed card network, created as an alternative to Visa and Mastercard. Adding RuPay would open card payments to a much larger group of Indian cardholders, since RuPay has grown significantly in recent years and many Indians hold RuPay cards.

There is also a separate question about Apple Pay — the digital wallet feature that stores card details securely on your phone and lets you tap to pay at stores. In February 2026, Reuters reported that Apple was in talks with Indian banks about launching Apple Pay. Apple has not made any formal announcement. The card payment system Apple just restored is different from Apple Pay, though they share some of the same underlying security technology. If Apple Pay does eventually come to India, some of the groundwork is already in place.

The bigger picture

India's banking regulator takes data security and payment safety seriously, more strictly than many other countries where Apple operates. The RBI has not signaled any plan to ease these requirements. What changed is that Apple decided to meet them head-on rather than work around them. For 1.4 billion people in India, that means a simpler, more familiar way to pay for apps and subscriptions starting now.