It’s possible Apple won’t have a choice if they want to sell phones in India. India is a huge and growing market, I’m not sure Apple can afford to give that up...

Apple's FY2019 revenue in India was ₹10,538.3 crore ($1.50 billion),[1] which is 0.58% of its global revenue of $260.17 billion.[2] India has a growing smartphone market, but it does not yet have a large market for Apple products.

1. https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/apple-india-s-reve...

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265125/total-net-sales-o...

I’d think it would be a pretty key area for expansion though, just given the sheer size of India’s population and their growing wealth.

I don't know, the growing wealth is still a good way off from becoming a ground for Apple to become very popular. Especially since the market has been heavily invested in Android devices due to the pricing disparity, it's a big jump and likely not one that can be alleviated simply by waiving some of the extra costs by manufacturing locally.

The most popular phones sold in India are low-midrange devices in the USD $80-400 range. It'll take quite a push from both the public and Apple to bring sentiment to a situation where Apple products have appeal. As it stands I'm not sure the demand will ever be there.

Actually Apple's market share in India is minuscule due to pricing effects, and they don't anticipate selling all that much in India for the foreseeable future

I beg to differ. They started manufacturing Apple phones in India and it has become a lot cheaper now. This is a solid move from Apple's side mind you.

I’m not sure Apple cares much about the market in India and would pull out of India before opening up the App Store. This won’t be popular.

I know plenty of my Indian colleagues who buy and bring home Apple devices for their friends and family. People will just start smuggling the devices in if they have to.

Smuggling won't do you any good when local companies stop making iPhone apps.

It doesn't work like that. iPhones weren't sold officially in Argentina for many years, but still there are many local iOS apps. There are many iPhones and most importantly, the wealthiest people generally have iPhones.

They will be forced to eventually. But from a technical/security standpoint it’s not at all hard for them to do. They use PKI for all apps and from the security standpoint, it’s a matter of adding another certificate to the trust chain. Obviously there are many UI considerations, but I’m just saying this doesn’t require some crazy core/kernel engineering revamp of iOS.

The first two sentences would’ve been perfectly sufficient to convey your point. The last sentence looks like flamewar bait which is why I downvoted your comment.

Not going to happen. Apple is bigger than Indian government.

I was curious about government vs corporation revenues, which are imperfect measures, but an interesting comparison and quickly found this:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/corporations-not-coun...

The raw data appears to be here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Jdgaz_qGg5o0m_6NCU_...

And it seems that India just barely beats Apple on the list. But it makes clear that most countries have less revenue than the largest companies.

Economies are usually considered by looking at GDP though. Walmart, Apple etc would still be impressive, but not quite as much.

True, and companies spend a massive amount of their revenue in operations, whereas I would assume governments have much more disposable income for activities other than putting capital into daily production.

Given that most governments spend more than they take in and can print money...

It might have a better chance than Epic on getting a different app store on iOS devices.

In what sense exactly?

I suspect this is a negotiation/political stance from the Indian government. Say you’re going to do it, then expect it from Apple.

I don’t think it’ll work. But I don’t think asking Apple nicely would work for a single second either.