The App Store (and Apple Music) isn’t working in Nigeria

Update: GTB’s Dollar VISA card works. Maybe I should create a list of working cards.

Since Apple switched the App Store (and Apple Music) to the local currency (Naira) a couple of months ago, NOBODY has been able to buy/update apps & renew their Apple Music subscription.

I personally have tried a lot of bank cards, cards that currently work for other stuff like Heroku, Postman Cloud, Udacity, Udemy etc. I’ve tried both Naira denominated cards & Dollar denominated cards.

Nothing works, except UBA MasterCard, every full moon, at midnight. (Which only lets me update apps and pay for Apple Music, but NEVER to buy new apps).

I don’t understand why:

1. Apple doesn’t seem to have noticed this

I assume it’s someone’s job to look at the stats and it’ll should be pretty obvious that Apple Music subscriptions/payments in Nigeria has dropped a ton, to like ~ZERO. Or that the number of people buying apps from here has dropped to ~ZERO.

It could be that they don’t care THAT much about this place. I’m about to drop some obviously flawed stats but bear with me.

According to gs.statscounter.com, 1.71% of connected Nigerians use mobile Safari (in Feb 2016). Let’s ignore the fact that I strongly believe most people use other browsers on their iPhones. Also, internetlivestats.com says there are 86,219,965 internet users in the country (as at 2016, I’m also inclined to believe that it’s a higher number now)

This means that at least 1,474,361 Nigerians used Safari on iOS to access the internet in the past month. I mean, it’s entirely possible that Apple doesn’t care about ~1.5 million users. Not like you’d be able to tell by watching their ads, they seem to care about everybody.

Anyway, I don’t care if we’re 1.5 million or just 10. We’ve spent money on products and services that currently don’t work as they should. I have an iPhone, a Macbook, an iPad and I’m unable to get new apps in 2017. It is unacceptable.

I know Apple was probably trying to help with the currency thing, it has it’s clear benefits. But we’ve been unable to enjoy those benefits or you know, buy anything, for far too long now.

2. Nigerian banks aren’t actually doing anything about it

Wait, scratch that, I know why; they’re mostly crap.