One would think Apple would be interested in the fourth largest country on the planet by population.
One would!
Admittedly, though, "country has many people" does not necessarily map well to "country has many people likely to buy an iPhone if we made it easier".
Case in point: Pakistan is the 5th most populous country and Nigeria is the 6th; both are close to Indonesia in population. Pakistan's average annual income is, I believe, about US$1500 and Nigeria's is around US$1900. There are still, of course, plenty of people in both of those countries that can afford and might want to buy an iPhone at the prices Apple currently sells them, but that number is a much,
much smaller fraction the population than somewhere like Australia with an average income closer to US$65,000; I would be willing to bet that Apple sells more iPhones in Australia than Nigeria and Pakistan combined, despite it having something like 1/20 the population, and that that would hold true even if there were a better Apple retail presence in both of those countries. For a company that makes only higher-end products, there's simply a larger addressable market.
Now, Indonesia is somewhere in between; it's average income is I believe around $5000. So, combined with the large population, there is definitely a good-sized addressable market there, and I think it's poor form that Apple seems to have mostly left the country at the mercies of fairly crappy resellers. But it's also fair to acknowledge that potential market is not proportional to the country's population.
Per a post just above, the total smartphone market in Indonesia is currently somewhere in the ballpark of 1/10 the size of that in the US, which is much lower per-capita, but also still pretty good sized; the higher-end fraction of that market is about 1/3, so maybe 12M units a year. Nothing to sneeze at for sure, and Apple already has a decent chunk of that market share without a decent retail presence.
I would speculate, without evidence, that geography might be a factor; Indonesia is not very close to anywhere Apple has a large presence or logistics. Plus the issue of "low density" buyers; maybe everyone who buys iPhones is concentrated in Jakarta and Bandung, but Indonesia is a big country, so the potential-iPhone-buyers-per square-mile is probably much worse than even rural parts of the US in much of the country.
Another factor may be Indonesia's laws relating to foreign companies (what this article is about in the first place), and its
relatively poor reputation as far as corruption goes; the US scored a not-great 69/100 last year, but Indonesia only managed 34/100, which from what I hear from the person I know well who lives there is not wrong--I'm constantly hearing complaints about how much of a pain it is to deal with corrupt government officials.
