Apple’s increased focus on the Indian market lately is evident through various avenues, be it local manufacturing to mitigate exorbitant pricing or opening its own online store. A more recent indication comes from the iOS 15 update that brings along a list of improvements specifically designed for Indian users. But the one that caught our attention is a new camera feature that deeply integrates India’s uber-popular UPI payment system.
Though fairly new, Unified Payments Interface, or UPI for short, has become a ubiquitous instrument for instant transfers across the country. For those unaware, UPI basically allows you to send money to an easy-to-parse personalized address (usually in the username@yourbank format) instead of having to enter all the bank account details. Your recipients can even share this address in the form of a QR code like you usually see at merchant counters.
With iOS 15, Apple has cut out a few extra steps from that already-easy payment flow. Given the camera app’s QR scanner is enabled, you can simply point your iPhone’s camera at a UPI QR code, and it’ll instantly suggest a UPI app, based on your usage pattern, to complete the payment. If you want to switch to another app, you can hit the button on the side, as shown in the included screenshots. Apple says that up to 10 apps can populate the list, depending on which ones are installed on your device.
Ever since most payment apps (Android and iOS) in India started stuffing superfluous features in a bid to be your all-around financial guardians, it’s gotten increasingly hard for me to quickly find the right option I need to make a transaction. Having to go through this each time, the option to scan a QR from the camera app itself to jump to the last few payment pages straight away would be no less than a godsend. And it gets even better, considering you can launch the camera app right from the lock screen, further reducing the steps required.
We tried replicating this on multiple Android phones, including a Pixel 4a, and all we got was an unusable UPI string in Google Lens. Our little experiment was somewhat successful on a Samsung phone, which pointed us to the Samsung Pay app to complete the payment, but that’s far from being universal. It’s a real shame because Google is the foremost UPI enabler, so much so that Google Pay is synonymous with UPI for many people. But still, Android phone cameras lack this simple trick, despite having a robust scanning tool in Google Lens.
Left: Scanning a code in Google Lens, Right: On a Samsung phone.
Everything else for India in iOS 15
The new UPI integration isn’t the only interesting bit in iOS 15; Siri is also going multilingual with this update — sort of. Apple has added support for what it’s calling “mixed English,” which is basically like Hinglish but now with more Indic languages, including Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Punjabi. You can’t ask Siri a whole lot in these languages, and the responses are still limited to Indian English, but it’s still nice to have a start somewhere. I’m particularly looking forward to proper support for my mother tongue Punjabi, which even Google Assistant can’t understand.
Siri on iPadOS 15
Besides this, the Messages app now lets you filter and block unnecessary notifications for promotional messages or those not on your contact list. This iOS 15 feature follows in the footsteps of Google Messages and Microsoft SMS Organizer and is currently available in India and China.
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