Apple Falls in Line With RBI's Data Rules, Slowly Brings Back Credit and Debit Card Option for App Store and iCloud Buyers

After keeping Indian users away from card payments for half a decade, Apple has quietly started allowing credit and debit cards again on its App Store and iCloud services in India. The change is rolling out slowly, starting with a small group of users before it reaches everyone.

Until now, Indian Apple users buying apps, games, or iCloud storage had only two payment options- UPI or net banking. Cards simply weren't accepted. That's now shifting, with Apple beginning the process of restoring credit and debit card payments for its digital services in India, including the App Store and iCloud subscriptions. For now, it's a limited rollout, but it marks the return of a payment option that had disappeared entirely from Apple's Indian storefront.

Why Cards Disappeared in the First Place

To understand why this matters, it helps to look back at what happened five years ago. Apple had switched off card payments for all its App Store and iCloud transactions in India back in 2021, right after the RBI brought in its card tokenisation rule. Since then, Indian users have had to make do with UPI and net banking only - a setup that annoyed plenty of people, especially those who wanted to use card-linked offers, cashback deals, or pay in easy instalments.

The reason Apple pulled cards had nothing to do with wanting to limit user choice, it came down to a technical and regulatory mismatch. The RBI's rule around tokenisation says that only card networks are allowed to store tokenised payment information, not outside companies like Apple. On top of that, this tokenised data has to physically sit on servers based inside India.

Apple's problem was that its global system usually backs up this kind of payment data in servers located in the US, Denmark, and China with nowhere close to meeting India's local storage requirement. Rather than spend money building a dedicated data centre just for Indian card data, Apple simply chose to switch off cards for Indian buyers altogether. It was, in a sense, the easier route out of a complicated compliance problem.

What's Different Now

Fast forward to today, and Apple appears to have finally sorted out that compliance puzzle. According to reports, the return of cards comes right after Apple fell in line with the RBI's card tokenisation rule, which requires tokenised data to be stored only by card networks and kept within Indian borders.

Interestingly, Apple still hasn't built a dedicated data centre in India to pull this of something industry watchers have flagged as a notable move on the company's part, since most global companies dealing with similar rules eventually end up setting up local infrastructure. This suggests Apple has found another way to satisfy the RBI's conditions without that heavy investment, though the exact mechanics haven't been laid out publicly.

Right now, only a small set of users are seeing the card option return. The plan is to expand this to every user gradually over the coming months, rather than switching it on for the entire country at once. This cautious pace is fairly typical for Apple, especially when a feature touches sensitive financial data and regulatory compliance.

Apple Pay Still Waiting in the Wings

This development is also being read as a sign of Apple's broader ambitions in India's digital payments space. The company has been trying to launch Apple Pay in the country for a while now, and its groundwork on tokenisation compliance for App Store cards is seen as connected to that larger effort. However, talks around Apple Pay's India launch have dragged on due to disagreements over commission rates and other regulatory hurdles, meaning that particular product still doesn't have a firm launch date.

For the average Indian iPhone user, this change simply means more flexibility at checkout- the ability to pay with a credit or debit card again, alongside the UPI and net banking options that have been the norm for the past five years. It also reflects a broader pattern playing out across the tech industry, where global companies are increasingly being asked to adapt their systems to India's data protection and financial security rules, rather than expecting India to adjust to them.

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