In China you can just add the equivalent of an Oyster card to the Apple Wallet app. I don’t know why TfL haven’t gotten on board with this as the technology isn’t any different.
When you add a card it gives you the choice of adding a credit/debit card or adding a transport card. You can tap the card on your phone to transfer the balance or just have a new one. For TfL it seems like a no brainer as it works instantly, you don’t need Face/Touch ID to use it (optional) either.
Imagine being able to tap your Oyster on your iPhone to transfer the balance. Then without unlocking or doing anything on your iPhone (what the previous poster said Express Transit Card, except it’s not just Japan), just hold it next to the oyster reader and it’ll let you through immediately. Journey details and individual charges are visible in the Wallet app too.
As far as I’m aware, the technology must still be very different making the use of Oyster in mobile wallets impossible.
Having said that, the way Oyster is managed is supposed to have changed to the same backend processing systems as contactless etc which would make this easy but I’ve never heard that the change has actually gone ahead. Until it does, your Oyster balance will continue to live on your card meaning it could never be updated with mobile transactions.
This is similar to the Calypso system which powers a lot of French transit systems. Balances live entirely on the cards so no need to worry about network requests at all.
In fact, Oyster would be even easier to put on a phone than a Suica card. I believe the underlying Suica card hardware uses a custom protocol instead of standard NFC and requires a custom chip in the phone (which Japanese iPhones have, but not the other models), where as Oyster is a standard NFC smart card just like any other debit card, for which phones already have the required hardware to emulate.
Be careful with the word “standard” there, NFC-F (FeliCa) is also a standard.
TfL run a hybrid system where the balance is both on the card and server-side.
Everything is possible, it just takes the political/corporate willpower to do it. Suica in Apple Wallet happened because the Japanese government, JR East, and most of the other transport operators opened up the technology and standardised the IC system across the country. Suica/IC has also been rapidly expanding as a payments scheme into stores, arcades, vending machines, and restaurants, making it a profitable and worthwhile project in its own right.
With all this momentum, support, and the 2020 Summer Oympic Games in Tokyo coming up, it made good sense for Apple and JR East to work together on bringing Suica to iOS.
As for Oyster or even ITSO, I’m not confident in those. Anything good about them was killed by political in-fighting.
