What would it take for India to get Apple Wallet ID support?

Apple Pay is finally here in India, twelve years after the US got it. And while I was happy to see it (you’d have to see my Apple Wallet to believe me), it only works with Axis Bank credit cards for now, which leaves out a large chunk of the population.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that Apple Pay is here in whatever limited capacity, but the thing I’ve wanted in Wallet for much longer is my ID, and two countries have already put theirs to work. In the US, 12 states and Puerto Rico let you add a driving licence, and a Digital ID made from your passport works at TSA checkpoints in more than 250 airports (still in beta), while in Japan the My Number Card lives in Wallet and you can tap it at corner shops, hospitals and pharmacies, or use a “Verify with Apple Wallet” button inside apps.

Other places seem to be heading the same way, though. Every EU country has to offer its citizens a digital ID wallet by the end of 2026, and Apple already lets you put Beijing and Shanghai metro cards in Wallet. From what I gather, Verify with Wallet runs on the same ISO standard UIDAI has already used, so it looks like a matter of the two of them sitting down and doing it.

India feels like the place where this could actually take off, since almost everyone has an Aadhaar and we picked up UPI so quickly that it now handles 24 billion payments a month. Android users have also been able to add Aadhaar to Google Wallet since April (PVR INOX uses it for age checks, Atlys uses it to fill in visa forms, and UIDAI has linked it to Samsung Wallet too).

One can easily think of more cases where it could be useful than cinemas and visa forms, for example:

As I said earlier, the technology isn’t the problem, because Wallet IDs follow a standard called ISO 18013-5 that lets a verifier check one field (say, “over 18”) without ever seeing your date of birth, and UIDAI has already published an Aadhaar spec in that exact standard, with around 40 fields that can each be shared on their own. If an app asks only for the over-18 flag, what comes back from the wallet looks roughly like this (simplified, in CBOR diagnostic notation, with made-up values):

{ "docType": "in.gov.uidai.aadhaar.1", "issuerSigned": { "nameSpaces": { "in.gov.uidai.aadhaar.1": [ 24(<< { / only the field that was asked for / "digestID": 7, "random": h'8f3a...c2', / per-field salt / "elementIdentifier": "AgeAbove18", "elementValue": true } >>) ] }, "issuerAuth": [ / COSE_Sign1, signed by UIDAI / h'a10126', / protected header: ES256 / { 33: h'3082...' }, / UIDAI certificate / 24(<< { / Mobile Security Object / "digestAlgorithm": "SHA-256", "valueDigests": { "in.gov.uidai.aadhaar.1": { 0: h'b9c1...', / hash of every field, shared or not / 7: h'4e0d...', 12: h'a37f...' } }, "deviceKey": { 1: 2, -1: 1, -2: h'...', -3: h'...' }, "docType": "in.gov.uidai.aadhaar.1", "validityInfo": { "validFrom": 0("2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"), "validUntil": 0("2027-10-25T00:00:00Z") } } >>), h'9d21...' / UIDAI's signature / ] }, "deviceSigned": { / signed by the phone's private key / "deviceAuth": { "deviceSignature": [h'a10126', {}, null, h'6c5e...'] } } }

What seems to be missing is Apple adding UIDAI as an issuer, and I couldn’t find any sign that the two are even talking. This is a bit frustrating, because India isn’t exactly a small market for Apple (an iPhone Duo costs ₹2,99,900 here, more than ₹1 lakh over the US price, and about a quarter of all iPhones are made in India now), and yet Apple Pay showed up with a single bank and no RuPay or UPI.

Are we really that low on Apple’s priority list? And has our government even asked?

Oh, and while we’re at it, Express Mode for metro cards would be nice too, since in Paris and Tokyo you can just tap your phone at the gate without even unlocking it.