It's definitely less secure for issuers: The entire point of having a secure element is that the issuers of digital wallet cards and passes can't trust all of their users to not decompile their app and extract a private key that grants fraudsters infinite money or transit rides. Physical cards and secure elements on the other hand are resistant against key extraction even in an adversarial environment.
There are ways to mitigate that in software (e.g. by not ever loading long-lived keys into software, fetching them just in time after device attestation etc.), but while that works pretty well for the kind of payments where the terminal needs to be online anyway, it's very risky for offline transactions.
That's why Suica and most other stored-value passes only support iPhones and a handful of specific Android devices that have a secure element (or can use the SIM card as one).
There are ways to mitigate that in software (e.g. by not ever loading long-lived keys into software, fetching them just in time after device attestation etc.), but while that works pretty well for the kind of payments where the terminal needs to be online anyway, it's very risky for offline transactions.
That's why Suica and most other stored-value passes only support iPhones and a handful of specific Android devices that have a secure element (or can use the SIM card as one).