In this week’s Sunday Reboot, the expansion of Apple Pay and Apple Music in some countries took a decade longer than they really should have. They also demonstrate how delays can occur for many different reasons.
Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories in Apple’s reality-warping space from the past seven days. All to start next week with a good first step.
Apple Music is added to its list of territories
This may come as a surprise to some readers, but I’m not in the United States. I’m one of the few members of the editorial team based in the UK, but trained to write American, and I forget the letter U in some words.
This leads to some problems when it comes to trying out new Apple services. It’s a problem when all your job is to talk about it.
Thankfully, the UK has access to almost all Apple services, but there are blind spots and differences.
For example, even though I have access to Apple Pay, I can’t use services like Apple Card because they are only available in the United States for now. Except sometimes I have to change regions for reporting and now annoyingly I have an Apple Cash card permanently visible in the Wallet app that I can’t use at all.
Slightly less pressing is the lack of puzzles in News+ here. While I can understand the financial issues of creating Apple Card in the UK, it seems like there would be fewer obstacles to adding deal breakers to Apple News, just the way US users like it.
That said, I’m still pretty happy to be in the UK, where Apple products and services come into play. Partly because we don’t suffer from the EU blackout on some upcoming features.
At least we get updates pretty quickly. Unlike some service updates that happened this week.
Apple Music has expanded to four new countries, including Albania.
On Wednesday, an Apple Music update finally rolled it out to four countries: Albania, Brunei, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan.
This seems okay enough, until you remember that Apple Music launched in June 2015 in over 100 countries. It took more than 11 years for Apple Music to be available in these four countries.
There is no real explanation for the lack of support in those countries, nor why it took so long.
The most time-consuming issues would involve licensing negotiations. However, both Apple and record labels love money, so you’d expect deals to happen at a fairly rapid pace.
On the other hand, it could easily be because Apple has bigger problems at hand than adding support to some countries that it seems to have forgotten about for over a decade.
In any case, it’s good that Apple Music is now available in four more territories that had to endure a very long wait.
It also reminds me that I’m lucky to live where I do. While there will always be differences between the availability of items in the US and UK, realistically I won’t wait a decade for something.
Wait, wasn’t Apple Pay already in India?
Slightly less disconcerting is the Apple Pay update that occurred on the same day. After launching in 2014, Apple has finally brought Apple Pay to India.
It certainly makes sense for Apple to do this, because it’s a huge market and an emerging one at that.
The problem here is that Apple said in 2017 that it was looking to bring Apple Pay to India. That’s a nine-year wait.
As for why it took so long, we could certainly blame regulations. Further financial laws were introduced in June 2022, which got in the way.
While the rest of the world could use Face ID for a transaction, India wanted everyone to use its Aadhaar ID system instead. The laws also affected subscriptions, requiring banks to notify users 24 hours in advance of any recurring transactions and allowing them to cancel them.
Apple Pay is finally available in India.
There is also the issue of a card tokenization framework, which required the use of encrypted tokens issued by local banks in India. This would have required Apple to make changes to how Apple Pay security and authentication works.
Support for the country’s unified payment interface also caused problems.
The situation was so bad that, in 2022, Apple completely gave up on credit and debit cards in the country.
During this time, both Google Play and Samsung Wallet decided to comply with the law instead of stopping card payments. This was clearly a case where Apple saw a huge amount of work and rules it would have to comply with, and believed it could work around or overcome the obstacles.
After negotiating with banks to work around the problematic elements, Apple finally tested card payments in India in July 2026, months before the launch of Apple Pay.
The permanent introduction of Apple Pay in India is definitely a good thing for Apple, especially in such an important market.
It will be interesting to see how much change Apple Pay brings to iPhone sales in India. Its main rivals have a big advantage due to Apple’s reluctance to comply with new laws, so it has a lot of catching up to do.
In the end, in the end
Apple’s decision to expand the reach of two of its services at once shows that there can be several reasons for a delay in rolling out a service in a country.
For Apple Pay in India, in addition to the various features that EU users cannot access, this is a regulatory issue. When you’re faced with legal issues affecting more than a hundred countries at once, you have to prioritize and pick your battles.
Although it is something that can take years to fully resolve.
For others, like bringing Apple Music to Albania, it seems to be less about legal issues and sticking to the letter of the law. It could easily be Apple giving it a very low priority to work on because there isn’t enough value to work on more.
With Apple Pay in India, there is enough of a carrot for Apple to work towards fixing the problem. Even if it will take almost a decade to solve it.
Last week’s Sunday Reboot discussed Apple’s fitness changes, Apple Watch annoyances, and how the Whoop-like device could be a very beneficial wearable.
