When Kevan Parekh took over from Luca Maestri in January of 2025 for all things accounting and financial planning at Apple, he knew exactly where to look. “I’m very passionate about metrics,” he quips. Parekh, Apple’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, is in India this week to meet with developers—a crucial signal about India’s importance as an iOS app innovation and talent hub. In a conversation with HT, Parekh explains that he sees India’s consumption patterns and developer innovation as two sides of the same coin.
“I think our share, from my standpoint, compared to what I think we are capable of is still low. We have a growing user base here,” he says. Parekh sees a direct link between a growing user base and an expanding developer demographic, referencing a flywheel effect. “As our user base grows, the developer community also has more users that can use their apps.”
Apple leadership, including CEO Tim Cook and Parekh, has consistently highlighted India’s importance in quarterly earnings calls, as a core growth driver, a multi-faceted market and a critical emerging geography across products and services for the tech giant.
In fact, during the Q2 earnings call earlier this month, Cook noted Apple’s growing retail presence in India. Parekh mentioned that countries including India which registered double-digit iPhone growth, are key to the iPhone business clocking $57 billion in revenue—a number up 22% year-on-year.
Counterpoint Research, in its latest quarterly data for India’s smartphone market share, notes that the Apple iPhone 16 was the highest-shipped smartphone in India for a third consecutive quarter. This propelled Apple to its highest shipments ever during that period of the year. Apple’s strategy of keeping the immediately prior iPhone generation on sale, continues to work wonders as a value proposition.
This bucks the trend at a time when India’s smartphone market has begun declining after a period of plateauing. In Q1 2026, research data suggests the overall market shrank by about 2%. This impact was driven by rising component costs, such as memory and storage, supply chain shortages and price hikes as the bill of materials began to inflate for phone makers.
Parekh makes it clear that Apple intends to continue to “invest across the board” in India. “We will invest in our coverage and being able to provide our products to more people, beyond tier one and tier two cities. We are seeing a lot of extension of sales of our products. We’re opening retail stores, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity to invest here,” he says.
Apple’s official retail presence in India now has 6 stores. Following the 2023 opening of Apple BKC in Mumbai and Apple Saket in Delhi, the retail expansion has seen significant momentum ion the last 12 months. Apple Hebbal in Bengaluru, Apple Koregaon Park in Pune, Apple Noida and Apple Borivali in Mumbai have since opened their large glass doors to customers.
Parekh and Apple have a long term vision for India. With a potential marker set five years down the road, Parekh insists the expectation is to grow significantly in comparative size and scale. “We expect to be much larger than what we are today,” he says. “It is our North Star to create the best possible products and services that impact people in a positive way,” he says, making it clear that “success is defined by the fact that we do that on a very broad scale in India.”
There is appreciation for the mix of vibrancy and depth India provides, with the company weighing much more beyond the often convenient collective metrics from the shop floor and shipment numbers. There is particular attention towards developers exhibiting creativity to solve problems as well as a local and global focus.
Two demonstrative developments underline this sentiment.
AI powered app creation for devs
Apple’s annual Swift Students Challenge which helps identify and support the next generation of designers, developers and entrepreneurs, saw a record number of entries and distinguished winners from India this year. The latter will be part of Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, in June.
Apple’s developer focus on India finds confidence rooted in momentum. In 2024, the App Store ecosystem in India facilitated close to ₹44.5 thousand crore rupees (that’s close to $5.3 billion) in billings and sales.
Catching them young, seems to be a commitment for Apple in India. Alongside the Swift Students Challenge, the company also has the iOS Student Developer program, a higher education partnership which currently has development centres at five universities in India including SRM Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai and MIT World Peace University in Pune.
At the core of this idea is enabling access to Macs and developer tools such as Xcode and Swift Playground for students. Parekh believes AI lowers the age barrier to app creation, thereby levelling the field globally. Provable, developed by Rehaan, a 14-year old student of the Bombay Scottish School, is a key example. This math learning app uses a block-based interface where students construct proofs by connecting logical steps.
Key to the momentum is Apple’s own Foundation Models framework, released late last year for developers. The 3-billion parameter on-device model is closely integrated with the Swift tool, and Indian app developers have also begun to utilise this across genres.
Diversity is perhaps best illustrated by Zoho using these models across its enterprise apps, and Indian app developer Parjanya Creative using them in their bedtime stories app called Katha Room, which tries to make mythology tales simpler and enjoyable for young listeners.
Signeasy, an enterprise e-signature tool developed in India, uses these models to summarise contracts, which tend to be long, laborious legal documents.
“It’s removed the age barrier, and it’s removed the barrier to learn another computing language. Now you can speak a natural language and actually focus on what you want to build instead of the process of doing it. I don’t understand Python coding, and now I don’t have to worry about that,” Parekh explains how AI models have widened the scope for developers.
