In this week’s Sunday Reboot, the expansion of Apple Pay and Apple Music to some countries has taken a decade longer than they really should. They also demonstrate how delays can happen for many different reasons.
Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get next week underway with a good first step.
Apple Music adds to its territory list
It may be 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 United Kingdom, but trained to write in the American way, and forget about the letter U in some words.
This does lead to some issues when it comes to trying out Apple’s new services. It’s a problem when your whole job is to talk about them.
Thankfully, the UK does have access to almost all of Apple’s services, but there are blind spots and differences.
For example, while I have access to Apple Pay, I cannot use services like Apple Card because they are US-only for the moment. Except that I have to change region sometimes for reporting, and now I annoyingly have an Apple Cash card permanently visible in the Wallet app that I cannot use at all.
A little less pressing is the lack of puzzles in News+ over here. Though I can understand the financial problems in setting up Apple Card in the UK, it seems there would be fewer obstacles in adding brainteasers to Apple News, just as U.S. users enjoy.
That said, I am still quite glad to be in the UK where Apple products and services come into play. Partly because we don’t suffer from the EU blackout of some upcoming features.
We at least get the updates fairly quickly. Unlike some service updates that happened this week.
On Wednesday, an update to Apple Music finally rolled it out into four countries: Albania, Brunei, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan.
This sounds fairly OK, until you remember that Apple Music was unveiled in June 2015 in over 100 countries. It’s taken over 11 years for Apple Music to be available in those four countries.
There’s no real explanation for the lack of support in those countries, nor why it took so long.
The more time-consuming problems would revolve around licensing negotiations. However, both Apple and record labels like money, and so you’d expect negotiations to happen at a fairly quick pace.
Then again, it could easily be because Apple has bigger problems at hand than adding support to some countries it’s seemingly forgotten about for over a decade.
Regardless, it’s a good thing that Apple Music is now available in four more territories that endured a very long wait.
It also reminds me that I’m lucky to live where I do. While there are always going to be differences between US and UK availability for things, I’m not realistically going to be waiting for a decade for anything.
Wait, Apple Pay wasn’t in India already?
Slightly less puzzling is the Apple Pay update on the same day. After launching in 2014, Apple finally brought Apple Pay live in India.
It certainly makes sense for Apple to do so, because it is a massive market, and an emerging one at that.
The problem here is that Apple said back in 2017 that it was trying to bring Apple Pay to India. That’s a nine-year wait.
As for why it took so long, we could certainly blame regulations for that. In June 2022, more financial laws were introduced, which got in the way.
While in the rest of the world you could use Face ID for a transaction, India instead wanted everyone to use its Aadhaar ID system instead. The laws also covered subscriptions, requiring banks to notify users 24 hours in advance of any recurring transactions, and allowing them to cancel.
Apple Pay is finally available in India.
There’s also the matter of a card tokenization framework, which required the use of encrypted tokens issued by local banks in India. This would’ve required Apple to make changes to how Apple Pay’s security and authentication ultimately functioned.
Support for the country’s Unified Payments Interface also caused problems.
It was so bad that, in 2022, Apple gave up on credit and debit cards completely in the country.
During this time, both Google Play and Samsung Wallet opted to comply with the law instead of ceasing card payments. It was clearly a case of Apple seeing a massive amount of work and rules that it would have to comply with, and the belief that it could work around or negotiate the hurdles away.
After negotiating with banks to get around the problematic elements, Apple eventually tested card payments in India in July 2026, months before Apple Pay’s rollout.
The final introduction of Apple Pay in India is certainly a good thing for Apple, especially in such an important market.
It will be interesting to see how much change Apple Pay will make to iPhone sales in India. It’s main rivals have a very large head start because of Apple’s unwillingness to abide by the new laws, so it has a lot of catching up to do.
Finally, eventually
Apple’s decision to expand the reach of two of its services at the same time demonstrates that there can be a variety of reasons for a delay of a service rolling out in a country.
For Apple Pay in India, as well as the various features EU users cannot access, it’s a regulatory problem. When you have to deal with legal issues affecting over a hundred countries simultaneously, you have to prioritize and pick your battles.
Even if it’s 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 just as easily be Apple making it a very low priority for it to work on because there’s not enough value to work harder at it.
With Apple Pay in India, there’s enough of a carrot for Apple to work to fix it. Even if it does take close to a decade to resolve.
Last week’s Sunday Reboot discussed Apple’s fitness changes, Apple Watch nagging, and how the Whoop-like device could be a very beneficial wearable.
This story originally appeared on Appleinsider
