iOS Wallet - Cannot Add Cards to Apple Pay

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So – I can’t add cards to Apple Pay on my iPhone (13 Pro, latest iOS). I used to be able to – I have several cards there already – but for the last couple of months nothing has worked. (I’m not sure when the problem started–I know I added a new Apple Card to Apple Pay last summer when I bought my Mac, but a few months back was the next time I had problems.)

If I go to the bank app and navigate to “Add Card to Apple Pay”, I get a dialog that says “Cannot Add Cards: The region setting for this device cannot be used with Apple Pay”.

If I go to the Wallet app and click the “+” button, I get an “Add Cards to Wallet” dialog, with a “Learn More” button that takes me to an Apple support page about adding items to Apple Wallet. My understanding is that I should instead get the opportunity to actually add cards at that point.

I’ve had this problem with two different cards from two different banks; in both cases the bank app clearly wants me to be able to use Apple Pay, and in one of the cases my wife has been able to add the same card to Apple Pay on her phone. Given that I’m having problems with two cards/banks and from both bank apps as well as from the Wallet app, I’m assuming the problem is at the hardware/OS level and not with the specific cards/banks, and (based on the message) that it may have something to do with identifying the region where I’m located. (I’m in North Carolina and haven’t gone abroad since 2011.)

I had a long phone call with Apple support a few weeks ago. They seemed to focus in on the fact that my employer has recently added mobile device management using Microsoft InTune and I have had that on my phone since the fall of 2022. My wife also has InTune (for the same employer) and has not had this problem. While on the phone with Apple, I signed out of InTune and deleted the device management profile and that did not resolve the problem. (I was unable to restart the phone as part of that test because I was using it to talk to the Apple representative.) At that point, Apple told me they could go no further unless I removed InTune entirely and did a factory reset and restore of my phone from backup.

Has anyone out there ever run into something like this? And does anyone have suggestions for a possible cause, or a troubleshooting step I can take that’s less extreme and time-consuming than a factory reset?

Thanks!

Dave

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One addendum – all the resources I see regarding the “region setting” error talk about going into settings and correcting your region. I have verified that my region is United States both for the phone as a whole and for my Apple ID. (As far as I know it’s never been anything other than United States in either location.)

Dave

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It might be a messed-up internal preference file. Maybe try changing your phone’s region to some other place, and then change it back to US. (Maybe reboot in between to make sure the change is seen by all the various background services.)

That’s the only thing I can think of.

On the other hand, a factory reset and restore from backup isn’t too big a deal. Just make sure you have a good backup. I recommend making one via a USB connection and the Finder immediately before doing the reset. Make sure your backup is password-protected, since macOS won’t back up passwords and login credentials to non-encrypted backups.

After restoring from your backup, the phone will take some time to re-download cloud-hosted content (e.g. apps and books/music purchased), but that should be the extent of it.

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I might consider trying to log out of the Apple ID and then log back in again and see if that helps.

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Yep, that did it! Toggled to Uruguay, restarted, toggled back to United States, restarted, and it all started working just fine! Wish I’d thought of trying that earlier.

Thanks so much!

Dave

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