To be fair, I’m pretty sure the registration is just for the trial. If you want to track your usage on London’s system, you can also link your card in their ABT equivalent system.
I totally agree on the high failure rate though. I think it’s been improving on MRT gantries, but the detection on bus is really bad and you can’t stand aside and let people board like on MRT.
i registered my physical card on the TfL app but the app doesn't show the usage on Apple Pay (I think because of the different numbers from the physical card).
yea i sincerely hope registration is only for the trial phase. And i kinda doubt detection rate can be improved from software side of their machines, because from what I can tell when I tap my contactless physical bank card, the latency is as just as slow but not as bad as when I use the phone.
My point is: if they want to enable mobile payments they should have taken the more official route: either work with smartphone manufacturers to enable mobile CEPAS (like mobile Felica) so we can load our ezlink/nets card into the phones like Suica, or switch to some other non-proprietary standards like felica or mifare (probably less likely, just to enable mobile payments?)
if they want to take the lazy EMV route, they should make sure their hardware/software is capable enough to detect EMV transactions reliably and quickly, or it'll just cause more problems than solving them