Apple started letting Indian users pay with credit and debit cards again in July 2026, ending a four-year suspension that began in May 2022. Visa and Mastercard are now accepted for App Store purchases, iCloud+ subscriptions, Apple Music, and other Apple services. RuPay, India's homegrown card network, will be added in a later phase, according to the Hindustan Times.

The original cutoff came from India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India. In 2021, it created a new rulebook for recurring card payments — the kind where a merchant charges your card automatically each month for a subscription. The rules required three main things: extra verification steps when you set up a subscription, a special encrypted version of your card details (called tokenization) held by the card company rather than the merchant, and a ban on merchants storing your full card number on their own servers.

Apple, along with several other global tech platforms, decided it was too complicated to rebuild its billing system to meet these requirements right away. So instead of updating their technology, they simply turned off card payments and told Indian users to rely on UPI (a local digital payment system), net banking, or prepaid Apple Account balances.

Four years is a long time to leave that friction in place, especially in a market Apple has publicly said matters to it. According to TechCrunch, a person familiar with the move confirmed that Apple finally updated its backend billing infrastructure to comply with the RBI's requirements. That meant implementing tokenization, building in re-authentication flows, and removing stored card data from Apple's own servers. Apple updated its public support documentation to reflect the change but, as usual, declined to comment.

The timeline says something worth thinking about. The RBI's core requirements weren't unique — other countries have similar rules — but India's specific way of implementing them, including how card data gets registered through banks and card networks, required deep platform-level work. This wasn't a simple setting change; it meant reworking core pieces of Apple's global billing system to work with India's regulatory setup. Whether the four-year gap reflects genuine technical complexity, the priority India held in Apple's internal roadmap, or both, isn't entirely clear from the outside.

What we do know is that Apple's services business in India kept growing throughout those four years. Tarun Pathak, a research director at Counterpoint Research, pointed out that UPI Autopay — a way to set up automatic recurring payments through India's UPI system — became genuinely capable and convenient, especially for people already comfortable using UPI. The fact that the services business grew despite the card payment gap suggests the restriction was an inconvenience, not a total barrier.

Still, card payments matter for a particular slice of Apple's audience in India. The most valuable subscribers — people buying multiple iCloud+ tiers, Apple One bundles, or AppleCare+ coverage — tend to use credit cards regularly. For them, UPI might feel like an extra step rather than their default choice. Bringing back card payments removes that friction point for the exact group Apple wants to keep and grow.

The RuPay addition is worth paying attention to. RuPay is India's own card network, run by the National Payments Corporation of India. Including it in the plan suggests Apple sees this as more than just a compliance checkbox. RuPay's tokenization infrastructure has matured significantly, and adding it would open card payments to a much broader set of Indian cardholders.

The Apple Pay question remains unsettled. Reuters reported in February 2026, citing Bloomberg News, that Apple was in talks with Indian banks and card networks about launching Apple Pay in the country. No announcement has come yet. The key thing to understand here is that restoring card payments for Apple Account purchases is narrower and separate from launching Apple Pay. Card payments let you buy apps and subscriptions. Apple Pay would let you use your iPhone to pay in stores or online at any merchant. They're different things. What does matter is that the underlying technical infrastructure — tokenization and authentication — that card payments require is the same groundwork Apple would need for Apple Pay, which could eventually make that rollout faster.

India's regulatory environment around digital payments has always been stricter than most markets where Apple operates, and the RBI shows no sign of easing those rules. What changed this time around is that Apple decided to build its systems to comply with those rules rather than working around them.

For the roughly 1.4 billion people in India, the practical effect is straightforward: more ways to pay for Apple's digital services, available now.