When Kevan Parekh took over all things accounting and financial planning at Apple from Luca Maestri in January 2025, he knew exactly where to look. “I’m very passionate about metrics,” he quipped. Parekh, Apple’s senior vice president and chief financial officer, is in India this week, where he also met with developers — an important signal about India’s importance as an iOS app innovation and talent hub. Speaking to HT, Parekh explains that he sees India’s consumption patterns and developer innovation as two sides of the same coin.
Apple leadership, including CEO Tim Cook and Parekh, have consistently highlighted the importance of India in the quarterly earnings call as a key growth driver for the tech giant, a multifaceted market and an important emerging geography in products and services.
“From my perspective, I think our share is still low compared to what we are capable of doing. We have a growing user base here,” he says. Parekh sees a direct correlation between the growing user base and the expanding developer demographic, referring to the flywheel effect. “As our user base grows, the developer community also has more users who can use their apps.”
In fact, during the second quarter earnings call earlier this month, Cook had mentioned Apple’s growing retail presence in India. Parekh noted that countries that reported double-digit iPhone growth, including India, were key to the $57 billion increase in iPhone business revenue – a number that is up 22% year-over-year.
Counterpoint Research, in its latest quarterly data for India’s smartphone market share, said the Apple iPhone 16 was the most shipped smartphone in India for the third consecutive quarter. This led Apple to its highest-ever shipments during that period of the year. Apple’s strategy of putting the immediately preceding iPhone generation on sale is working wonders as a value proposition.
This reverses the trend at a time when India’s smartphone market had started declining after a period of stability. In the first quarter of 2026, research data shows that the overall market has declined by about 2%. The impact was driven by rising component costs, such as memory and storage, supply chain shortages, and rising prices as the bill of materials for phone makers began to rise.
Parekh clarified that Apple intends to continue “investing at all levels” in India. “We will invest in our coverage and be able to take our products to more people beyond the tier one and tier two cities. We are seeing a lot of expansion in the sales of our products. We are opening retail stores, and I think there are a lot of opportunities to invest here,” he says.
Apple’s official retail presence in India now consists of 6 stores. The past 12 months have seen significant momentum in retail expansion, following the opening of Apple BKC in Mumbai and Apple Saket in Delhi in 2023. Apple Hebbal in Bengaluru, Apple Koregaon Park in Pune, Apple Noida and Apple Borivali in Mumbai have opened their large glass doors for customers.
Parekh and Apple have a long-term vision for India. With potential markers set after five years, Parekh emphasizes that a significant increase in comparative size and scale is expected. “We hope to be much bigger than what we are today,” he says. “Our North Star is to create the best possible products and services that impact people in a positive way.” He clarified that “success is defined by the fact that we do this on a very large scale in India.”
While the mix of vibrancy and depth that India offers is appreciated, the company values it far more than the often convenient collective metrics of shop floors and shipment numbers. Special attention is given to developers with a local and global focus, as well as those who demonstrate creativity in solving problems.
Two demonstrative developments underline this sentiment.
AI powered app creation for developers
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 coveted winners from India this year. The latter will be part of Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, in June.
The confidence lies in Apple’s developer focus on India. In 2024, the App Store ecosystem in India to facilitate close ₹44.5 thousand crore rupees (about 5.3 billion dollars) in billings and sales.
Catching them at an early age seems to be a commitment for Apple in India. Along with the Swift Students Challenge, the company also has the iOS Student Developer Program, a higher education partnership that currently has development centers across five universities in India, including SRM Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai and MIT World Peace University in Pune.
The core of the idea is to enable access for students to Mac and developer tools like Xcode and Swift Playgrounds. Parekh believes that AI reduces the age barrier in app creation, thereby leveling the field globally. Provable, developed by Rehan, a 14-year-old student of Bombay Scottish School, is a prime example. This math learning app uses a block-based interface where students create proofs by combining logical steps.
The key to the speed is Apple’s own Foundation Model framework, which was released to developers late last year. The 3-billion parameter on-device model is closely integrated with Swift tools, and Indian app developers have also started using it across genres.
Diversity is perhaps best illustrated by Zoho using these models in its enterprise apps, and Indian app developer Parjanya Creative has used them in its bedtime stories app called Katha Room, which tries to make mythology simple and entertaining for young listeners.
Signacy, an enterprise e-signature tool developed in India, uses these models to summarize contracts, which tend to be long, laborious legal documents.
“It’s removed the age barrier, and it’s removed the barrier of learning another computing language. Now you can speak a natural language and really focus on what you want to build rather than 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.