Amid rumours of iPhone 5 releasing soon in India, Apple has taken another step to ease the app store experience for Indian developers and consumers. Indian Rupee among seven others including Russian Ruble, Turkey’s Lire, Indonesian Rupiah, Israel’s New Shekel, Saudi Arabia’s Riyal, South Africa’s Rand and United Arab Emirates’ Dirham have been added to the list of supported currencies for the app store. This will allow consumers to purchase apps in their local currency who earlier had to pay in US Dollars and that too with an international credit card.
This comes in comparison to Google, which although already supported Indian Rupees from the buyer’s end, allowed Indian developers to sell paid apps by making India a supported country for Google Checkout just recently.
Initially there were reports of incorrect pricing in the app store, with some apps being sold at the price of Rs.0.99 instead of making the correct conversion from $0.99. This seems to have been corrected now.
Additionally, Apple has also mentioned that these countries would become separate “report regions” i.e. developers will be able to access separate reports for individual currencies of their apps sold in these regions. However, as explained by TechCrunch, “October will be split into two: one part before the change all in US Dollars for ‘rest of the world’, and the other part after the change.”
Apple has been recently reconsidering its strategy for retail sale of the iPhone in India, which shows how the company is trying to focus on the Indian market. Hopefully the country is expected to receive greater attention from the tech giant which has largely been ignored before. This should definitely help in improving the iOS developer ecosystem in the country.
