Apple Pay has launched in India. Apple confirmed the Apple Pay India rollout on 29 September for customers with Axis Bank-issued Visa and Mastercard credit cards, nearly twelve years after the company first announced the payment service in the United States. India was one of the last major markets without Apple Pay, and the opening rollout is narrow: a single issuing bank, credit cards only, and no support yet on Mac.
What Apple Pay supports in India right now
At launch, Apple’s announcement covers Visa and Mastercard credit cards issued by Axis Bank. Cardholders add them to Apple Wallet the same way as in any other market, then use tap-to-pay NFC transactions at in-store merchants or pay online through apps and Safari. The service works across iPhone, Apple Watch and other Apple devices, but not Mac; macOS support has been confirmed as coming, without a date attached. Debit cards, other card networks and every other Indian bank are absent from this first phase.
Apple Pay works by replacing a card’s real number with a device-specific token stored in the iPhone’s Secure Element, so a compromised transaction never exposes the underlying card. Each issuing bank has to build support for that tokenisation on its own systems before its cards can be added to the wallet, which is one reason a market the size of India doesn’t switch on for every bank at once, and why the launch list runs to one so far.
Why other banks are still holding back
India’s card payments market has run for years on the National Payments Corporation of India’s own tap-to-pay and UPI rails, which gave local banks little incentive to build for a proprietary wallet competing with a system that already works on any phone. TechCrunch reported that some of India’s largest banks are holding off on supporting Apple Pay for now, even as the service goes live. That leaves Axis Bank as the sole launch partner in a market with dozens of major card issuers, and it means most Indian iPhone owners still cannot use Apple Pay with the card already in their physical wallet.
Apple Pay India and Apple’s playbook for staged rollouts
Apple has a pattern of opening a market with one partner and expanding from there, the same approach we flagged in our coverage of how Samsung may follow Apple’s pricing playbook for the Galaxy S26. There, the read was that competitors watch Apple’s staged moves before committing to their own pricing. Here, the staged move is the rollout itself: one bank now, a wider bank list and Mac support later, once Apple has working relationships and merchant coverage in place. What’s different from the pricing story is that this time it’s Apple’s own partners, the banks, that get to decide the pace, not Apple alone.
What to watch next
Two things determine how fast Apple Pay India actually matters to shoppers: how many more banks sign on, and when macOS support arrives. Until more of India’s largest issuers join Axis Bank, the service stays a niche option rather than a default one for the country’s iPhone base.
