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Apple’s increased attention to the Indian market in recent times is evident through a variety of avenues, from locally manufacturing to alleviate sky-high prices or opening its own online store. A more recent indication comes from the iOS 15 update which brings a list of improvements specifically designed for Indian users. But the one that caught our eye is a new camera feature that deeply integrates India’s very popular UPI payment system.
Although fairly recent, the Unified Payment Interface, or UPI for short, has become a ubiquitous instrument for instant transfers across the country. For those who don’t know, UPI basically lets you send money to a personalized, easy-to-scan address (usually in the username @ your bank format) instead of having to enter all the bank details. Your recipients can even share this address in the form of a QR code as you usually see at merchant counters.
With iOS 15, Apple removed a few more steps from this already easy checkout flow. Since the camera app’s QR scanner is enabled, you can just point your iPhone’s camera at a UPI QR code, and it will instantly suggest a UPI app, depending on how you use it, to make a payment. If you want to switch to another app, you can press the button on the side as shown in the included screenshots. Apple says up to 10 apps can fill the list, depending on which ones are installed on your device.
Since most payment apps (Android and iOS) in India started offering superfluous functionality in an attempt to be your complete financial guardians, it has become more and more difficult for me to quickly find the right option which i need to complete a transaction. Having to go through this every time, the ability to scan a QR from the camera app itself to jump straight to the last checkout pages would be nothing short of a godsend. And it’s even better, given that you can launch the camera app directly from the lock screen, which further reduces the number of steps required.
We tried to replicate 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 quite successful on a Samsung phone, which directed us to the Samsung Pay app to finalize the payment, but it’s far from universal. It’s a shame because Google is the main catalyst for UPI, so much so that Google Pay is synonymous with UPI for many people. But still, Android phone cameras don’t have this simple trick, despite having a robust scan tool in Google Lens.
Left: Scan a code in Google Lens, Law: On a Samsung phone.
Everything else for India in iOS 15
The new UPI integration isn’t the only cool thing in iOS 15; Siri is also getting multilingual with this update – sort of. Apple has added support for what it calls “mixed English,” which basically sounds like Hinglish but now with more Indian languages including Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam and Punjabi. You can’t ask Siri much in these languages, and the answers are always limited to Indian English, but it’s always nice to start somewhere. I especially look forward to proper support for my native Punjabi language, which even the Google Assistant cannot understand.
Siri on iPadOS 15
In addition to that, the Messages app now allows you to filter and block unnecessary notifications for promotional messages or those not in 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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