Apple extends 20% bonus in India for adding money to Apple ID

Apple has given its customers in India another chance to add funds to their Apple ID and to receive a 20% bonus, at a time when Apple and developers brace for a regulatory change affecting App Store subscriptions.

Customers in India adding funds to their Apple ID will see a notification advising they will get a "20% bonus" if they add funds to their account before the end of October. The bonus applies for anyone adding between 100 rupees ($1.33) and 15,000 rupees ($200) to their account balance, in a single transaction.

Running until October 31, the deal's availability partially depends on the user's account information or purchase history. Examples given by Apple, as spotted by developer Mustafa Yusuf and first reported by 9to5Mac, include users gaining a bonus 400 rupees for a 2,000 rupee top-up, or an extra 1,000 rupees for topping up 5,000 rupees.

This isn't the first time that Apple has provided such an offer to its users in India. In fact, reports from September indicate the same offer was provided to users. The credit to the account can be used for App Store purchases, as well as to pay for service subscriptions, such as Apple Music.

The bonus credit offer could be useful for Apple, as it warned local developers in September that a regulatory change by the Reserve Bank of India will require financial institutions and "gateways" to obtain user approval before completing auto-renewable credit card and debit card transactions.

By adding funds to the Apple ID, it would be feasible that the preloaded funds could be used for multiple subscription payments, without requiring enforcement of the new mandate.

1 Comment

EsquireCats 1268 comments · 8 Years

About 3 years ago

I'm curious how much of Apple's 15%/30% cut goes into these kinds of activities and the actual running of the stores.

Data-center costs: the raw equipment, staff, power, expansions/upgrades, machine maintenance and green projects to run these at net zero, fees for third party data centers and security and denial-of-service protection.
Actual hosting costs worldwide. E.g. Spotify pay minimal amounts to Apple, but Apple foots the bill for the distribution of every update to their millions of customers
Gift cards and retail: Third party locations (e.g. supermarkets) are purchased and the retail store also gets a % cut. The card themselves are almost always with a 10% bonus credit to entice pre-purchase.
Transaction fees, refunds and advertising.
Probably a bunch more I've missed.

While Apple's figures for "services" are vague, it's undeniable that this category wasn't performing until Apple introduced secondary services such as iCloud, Apple Pay and the various subscription media services.

Considering the above it doesn't seem like the store is designed to make all that much profit, and that developers are already getting the optimal deal for their % cut - I tend to consider that the Spotify's of this world are unfairly greedy in their demands (something that is echoed by how little they pay artists that form their service.)