Apple Pay not working in the UAE due to how Shopify defines addresses

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
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Topic summary

Apple Pay fails at checkout in the UAE because Shopify’s address fields (“City” and “Area”) are defined in a way that triggers an “invalid billing or shipping address” error.

Claimed root cause: Shopify enforces a preset list that treats certain “areas” as “cities,” which conflicts with the address Apple Pay provides and causes validation to fail.

Impact: Merchant reports hundreds of lost sales each week and says the checkout experience is being hindered.

Proposed solution: Allow customers to enter address details freely (free‑form City/Area) rather than selecting from restricted presets.

Context: Issue has been raised previously (linked thread) in the Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment category, tags: checkout, shipping. No screenshots or code; the error message is central.

Status: Unresolved/ongoing. Merchant urges Shopify to prioritize a simple configuration change to restore Apple Pay functionality in the UAE.

Summarized with AI on December 15. AI used: gpt-5.
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Hi guys,

this has been already raised previously

https://community.shopify.com/post/2316002

Apple Pay doesn’t work in the UAE due to how Shopify defines the fields “City” and “Area", thus showing an error of “invalid billing or shipping address”

the solution is to give freedom to the customers to write the address the way they define it without having Shopify list a certain number of cities as “areas”

this issue results in hundreds of lost sales every week.

the best checkout in the world is hindering my stores progress

i hope this can be tackled as the solution is extremely simple