Apple's Eddy Cue says Apple Pay coming to India, no firm date set

"We're working on it, but no date to announce at this point," Cue explained to Livemint. "We like to announce a date that we know is a 100 percent."

Cue noted that Apple Pay has been difficult to scale up globally, and the company is dealing with one market at a time. Each launch involves negotiations with local banks and card issuers, some of which have been hesistant to sign up given the small fee Apple claims from each transaction.

At over 1.3 billion people, India is the world's second-most populous country, making it a critical destination for Apple Pay. The iPhone does control just a small fraction of the local smartphone market however, which may explain why the company has concentrated on places like China first.

Apple is separately working on establishing iPhone production and retail presence in India, which could boost iPhone sales.

Cue also spoke to Livemint about the pace of Apple innovation, denying that there's been any slowdown, while simultaneously warning that people shouldn't expect radical changes every year.

"When you think of the products that we've built over time, you own a lot of them," he said. "And you just assume that every year was a new product. But it wasn't. You can't do revolutionary new products, every two months or six months or whatever. They take time."

The company's next big milestones are the iPhone X — with Face ID and an edge-to-edge OLED display — and the HomePod, a Siri-equipped smartspeaker that will take on products from Amazon, Google, and Sonos.