According to the country’s IT ministry, the Google Play services won’t be terminated after December 1, 2022, because the central bank has been instructed to restore the system for making such payments to foreign corporations.
After the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) stopped using the direct carrier billing (DCB) system, payments made by mobile firms to foreign service providers like Google, Amazon, and Meta that totaled $34 million annually were inaccessible.
Analysts claimed that the action was taken to limit dollar outflows. The future of these services would no longer be in doubt as long as Android customers could continue to utilize them with mobile carrier billing.
Earlier, it was reported that android users in Pakistan have been denied buying paid apps or using in-app paid services through mobile operator billing — a way for users to pay for apps using their mobile credits — because the SBP has blocked payment of $34 million to world companies.
Aminul Haque, the MoIIT’s minister of information technology and telecommunication, claimed in a statement on the ministry’s Twitter account that he wrote to Ishaq Dar, the minister of finance, requesting that he instruct SBP to unfreeze the payments.
He said that the choice was made following extensive stakeholder participation.
“All telecom operators recently sent a letter to the IT minister expressing their concerns that this problem would probably come up at some point.”
In a letter sent to the SBP on Friday, the MoIIT, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), and four cellular mobile operators (CMOs) requested that the bank reconsider its decision to revoke the DCB mechanism for payment of the dollar charge in light of the country’s current financial crisis.
According to Haque, the telecom industry was already struggling, and these moves might only make things worse.
The minister claimed that the SBP’s move to halt payments will put an end to Pakistan’s use of paid Google applications, freeze payments to international organizations, and raise questions about the nation’s credibility. He added that the state bank should be instructed to continue the payment and that the finance minister should act right away.
Pakistani users would have been obliged to download Google and other foreign apps in order to make payments using credit cards or debit cards only if the government hadn’t stepped in.
But the credit card facility is limited to a certain number of customers, so the majority of mobile users may be deprived of downloading apps from Google Play.
