One example is Visa Japan has some ongoing fallout with Apple and JR East, so you cannot use your Visa credit card to top up your Suica transit card with Apple pay, but it works fine on Android with Google pay. Lot of merchants get confused between NFC/Apple Pay/Google Pay/Visa Pay and so many spin offs of something that's essentially just NFC A-B mode of payment.
With Osaifu Keitai you just choose one provider - Passmo, Suica etc and just top up money in any form you want - cash, credit card, debit card, points etc. And it just works. No internet, no middlemen and sub millisecond latency which is very crucial transit payments.
> You can't use it internationally, unlike contactless EMV.
Technically it's incorrect. Visa/Mastercard works internationally, I have a RuPay card from India and it didn't work internationally until recently. So it depends on the reciprocal agreement between networks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_reciprocal_agreements
Also I'm sure you'd agree it's easier to trust something issued internationally if there was some element of online verification to it (admittedly probably not much of an issue for transit applications).
So, I completely understand when you mean NFC payments vs UPI. I made my statement not as a direct technical comparison, but to inform that there is a way for seamless payments in India now which wasn't available earlier. Btw, Apple has put its plans to integrate UPI with Apple Pay on hold due to disagreements with data storage, I wonder what its doing in China.
Interestingly, it's not my friends in US who raved about Apple Pay but those in England(Not sure what's that about).
Western countries in your statement is probably mainly USA, as most of Europe has been using contactless payment via NFC for many years.
Apple Pay is effectively just using the phone’s NFC chip instead of that embedded in the debit/credit card, although it does bring one advantage: Because the iPhone has its own authentication system, you’re never asked for PIN code when paying with your phone, whereas paying with a debit/credit card will ask for PIN if the amount is above a certain threshold, or if it hasn’t asked for a long time.
I have been using payment apps in Asia, not India, but Apple Pay is definitely more seamless (or NFC enabled cards), as these only require you to hold them near the terminal, whereas a payment app require first being launched, and then either scanning a QR code and confirming, or bringing up your QR code to have the cashier scan it.
Don’t get me wrong: I am very much a fan of the concept of UPI, I am commenting just to clarify that universal payment interface with third party apps is different than NFC enabled payments, where I think it is really the latter, that your friends in Western countries are describing as seamless.