But you can add a Japanese suica card to the wallet. I believe they struck a special deal with them.
The bigger issue I see is suica uses a different technology so the phone knows what card to use, oyster uses the same as contactless so it may be harder for the phone to know it is an oyster reader and not a normal payment reader. Although that’s all just a guess.
What I’m saying is that you’d choose the Oyster card before getting to the reader, activate AP before touching it using the double click and then touch it like usual. The phone doesn’t need to know if the reader is a yellow London one or not, you’d manually select the Oyster instead of your default AP card. Maybe they’d even add the feature that if you’re near you ‘favourite’ (manually selected) Tube station, the Oyster card would be the default selection
If you want a week, month, or year travelcard its only possible with an Oyster card, as far as I know.
If you’re only interested in pay-as-you go, contactless is probably better than Oyster as its more convenient (no need to top up) and benefits from weekly capping (which for some reason is not available on Oyster pay-as-you go).
Or Pink…on some transit stations on the tube they have pink readers as well as yellow. Yellow for entrance and exit, pink for changing between rail and underground services.
Yes, those too. Pink isn’t just for changing between rail services, is it? It’s also for if you’re taking a longer, cheaper route around London that doesn’t go within the more central zones.
Contactless has weekly capping for the same prices as a weekly travelcard, so only monthly and annual travelcard users need use Oyster.
There is one other use case where Oyster is still better though, holders of some railcards get a third off off-peak fares and daily caps with Oyster which is not yet possible with contactless.
But yes, otherwise contactless is the same price as Oyster*, but a lot more convenient, so there’s no need to use Oyster if you don’t fall into one of those two groups.
* Actually, there are some edge cases where contactless is cheaper than Oyster, which Geoff will now explain.
Are you sure contactless weekly cap can be as cheap as using a 7 day travel card in all scenarios? In particular, I’ve wondered for a while (but never tried to figure out) what happens for someone who usually travels outside zone 1 and only occasionally goes into zone 1.
A 7 day zones 2-4 travel card costs £28.20. If someone spends 5 days travelling in zones 2-4 and also ventures into zone 1 on one of these days, I suspect they’d only be charged up to £6.40 in pay-as-you go fares on the day they went into zone 1 (zone 1 day cap). Total weekly cost = £34.60
If you do the same thing with contactless, would the contactless system charge the zones 1-4 weekly cap (£49, which is the same as 5 x daily cap) or would it figure out there is a cheaper way to charge the weekly expense (combination of 2-4 weekly cap and 1 x zone 1 daily cap) and charge that?
I don’t know for certain as I use an annual card, but based on the video I posted above (which focuses on daily caps), I would expect the system to work out that the cheapest way is the zone 2-4 + singles to zone 1.
Interesting - I use both an Oyster card and contactless. For me, contactless cards are all slower - we’re talking milliseconds but it’s perceivably different when passing through barriers.
(Interesting thought: I wonder if the generation of Oyster card makes a difference? Mine’s a first generation one - TfL keeps nudging me to upgrade when I log on.)
This seems feasible. The difference should not be so large that your Monzo card causes you to “break stride” though 
That would be a cardinal sin on the tube network.
Crikey, yes. And can you imagine if it was just one brand of card? The Standard would start a campaign and everything!
(Just to be clear though: there’s no difference between my Monzo card and any other contactless one I’ve tried, so I think we’re reasonably safe from George Osbourne.
)
Contactless should do this since it’s post-processed at the end of the day rather than committed at the end of every journey like the classic Oyster card.
Pink readers aren’t needed at all when changing services, they’re purely for the demonstration of avoidance of the lower numbered fare zones as you said.
Yeah, that’s what I thought, thanks 
You can tell there is a strong London presence on the forum when milliseconds make the difference between “amazing” and “eurgh!”.
Try sitting behind a tractor on a 5 mile bendy single track road… Pretty sure they don’t take Oyster cards or contactless!
There’s always auto top up. They take £20 out of your account when your Oyster balance gets low.
I always use Apple Pay on the buses and found it to be fine, not slow at all. I don’t use the tube much, but again, when I have used it, i’ve never noticed any slowness with it.
Whenever I get a bus or tube, or in fact when I use Apple Pay, I always pre-auth the payment by double tapping on the home button and Apple Pay stays active for around 1 minute.
Wouldn’t know ask if I use London use a one of travel card that’s included when going in and out of London.
I saw an article on Londonist about this recently.
Apparently there is a difference of the order of a few hundred milliseconds
Yay, Suica talk!
Suica uses Sony FeliCa technology and is a stored value card, this means that the card is the source of truth for the balance and other than a small blacklist, gates don’t have to check with anybody else before approving travel. Additionally, Suica cards have quite a bit of processing on the card itself that can handle reading and writing to the card’s onboard ledger and balance.
With end to end control of the technology, JR East pushed the timing down to the point where their slower gates can still handle 60 people per minute while TfL Oyster gates tend to only support 40 people per minute.
One of the more interesting parts of the FeliCa payment systems is that it’s build to expect that the terminal will select the “application” that it’s looking for. This results in you having to specifically say the network of the payment system you’re using if you have a traditional Osaifu-Keitai phone.
As IC network cards are considered to be effectively cash, there’s no required security on any Suica card or phones. In addition, JR East don’t want people fumbling around at the gates trying to Face ID or Touch ID authenticate with their phones. To get around this, Apple Pay introduced the concept of a Express Transit Card slot on the device. When a compatible card is added to Apple Pay (Suica being the only one currently), you can select the card to put in the Express Transit Slot and can then just tap the device on the reader without performing any authentication!
With a few more tweaks such as the gates being able to be normally open rather than normally closed, Japan can get some incredibly impressive gateline throughput! 