I am quite annoyed by the people who don't see the issue with eSim because "they never had an issue" with it. It's like having one murder down your block and stating that you don't see the issue because nobody attempted to murder you so far. ESim are backed up as part of iCloud backups, had one dodgy carrier in Europe (Lyca) who never activated my eSim so I switched back to a new carrier but I had to get a transfer authorization from Lyca. Guess what , since I was no longer a customer I was sent to hell by their customer support. Best joke that it was impossible to remove on my iPhone. It was part of the backup, a reset attempt did not solve it so I had to drive 200km to an Apple store to get a hard reset and the Apple genius advising me against restoring my data "otherwise it would retrieve the faulty ESIM back in your phone" !!!
You can’t actually backup an eSIM. If you could, they would be easy to clone. I know Apple uses that terminology, but that isn’t what is happening in the background. Same with transferring an eSIM. A new one is issued each time.
I occasionally buy travel data, and 3 of probably 8-ish instances had me on the phone with support for at least 20 minutes (and once an hour) to make an esim work. Perhaps the problem is android. But I've never had that experience with a physical sim. :shrug:
Yeah, eSIMs are built for high trust locations. I just use Google Fi and they’re pretty decent about it all. This whole “switching a carrier” business is kind of pointless busywork I don’t do any more.
Technologically, eSIMs are pretty nice. The electrical interface between the phone modem and the eSIM is the same as with a real SIM card, and the eSIM can run the same applications as a real SIM card, so at this point you can buy smartcards that can be swapped between devices and run eSIM applications. esim.me, 9esim and the "sysmocom eUICC for eSIM" (seems to be the most open/friendly at this point) are some of the options. Most of them offer an app for management, but there are also standardized interfaces.
SIM cards have always been secure elements that the provider trusts. With an eSIM, you can already own that secure element and the provider can provision it with their application. You can even have the applications from multiple providers on the same physical secure element.
The major advantage is now that the expensive and time-consuming part of provisioning a new mobile service (sending out a physical SIM card) can be replaced with a few standardized API calls. This is cheaper (which makes the extra cost some providers charge for an eSIM look quite silly) and a lot quicker, which enables new business models for short-lived cell connection services.
A world where all cell service providers offered eSIMs would be slightly nicer. But manufacturers removing the option of swapping the secure element is very annoying at the same time.
The spec allows carriers to disallow removal of an eSIM, to allow for subsidized phone business models (in other words: this change was demanded by the carriers). So you should blame the carrier, not the manufacturer that simply implements the spec.
It might be nice if manufacturers implement a HUUGE LOUD warning when enabling an eSIM that requires carrier authorization to remove though. Someone should put that in the Android bug tracker.
I think the major advantage for consumers is being able to securely ensure their cards never breaks and device restarts make their sim always available, no need for pin.
Even if someone steals your phone they can’t disable your SIM card unless you don’t have a pincode.
I’ve had a SIM card constantly fail and require me to put my pin to unlock it multiple times in the same day. If someone wanted to call me they would not be able to because I didn’t know it was off.
eSIM is also great for travel. There's a lot of competition on price and it's easy to check esimdb to find the cheapest carrier that meets your needs for a given trip. Download the eSIM in advance and you're good to go as soon as your plane lands
> We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card.
Some people might have given it up. I personally own a Sony Xperia phone, and intend to buy another Xperia next year, which will almost certainly still have both. In fact Sony is the one manufacturer that returned to a headphone jack after having removed it for a while. It might be more expensive than the competition, but this is my voting with my wallet.
Do note that unfortunately any future devices by Sony are just phones by other manufacturers that are just Sony branded. Sony stopped their first party device manufacturing, so your mileage of the hardware might be wildly different in the future.
Most phones that cost less than ~300 USD still have a headphone jack and microSD slot.
I've never understood spending more than that on a phone anyway, you can't exactly use all that processing power on a phone operating system. Unfortunately some of the bad features from expensive phones have been moving down to the cheaper ones, like the destroyed screen that's missing its corners and has a hole for the camera in it for some reason.
I just bought a newer phone and was surprised to see even the ~$200 Samsungs were lacking a headphone jack. That threw them right out of contention, so I ended up getting a 2024-model Motorola (the 2025s were $50 more and reviews said they offered no meaningful performance boost).
I've rocked pixels for a good while now, but the Xperia lineup has always been something I've really debated.
My largest concern is camera quality: obviously it is Sony, but if you wouldn't mind, could you elaborate on their camera 'stack' a bit (esp. in relation to pixel phones if you have first hand experience...).
The way its bandwidth is too low to broadcast and receive at high quality at the same time meaning everyone calling into the zoom call with their fancy airpods sound like they're calling from the other side of the moon while my 5$ plug-in earbuds sound like a damn recording studio in comparison.
Worse quality, latency, potential to lose one (or both) earbuds, having to faff with batteries and charging and cases (and charging the charging case) when I can just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears. The knotting is a small price to pay for the improved quality and convenience in every other way.
Something I read recently which I think is interesting food for thought:
Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?
Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators
Shouldn't it be the same thing? You either have the DAC on your phone convert the digital music file to an analog signal and send it over the aux cord to the speakers in the headphones, or have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right? It's not like you're plugging your headphones into a record player.
> have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right
This is not how Bluetooth wireless audio works. PCM audio is re-encoded on-device into any one of a few Bluetooth-capable codecs that is then streamed to the client device. This is a primary cause of latency.
In my experience the connection is much easier to accidentally break through movement (e.g., walking) with a USB-C adapter than straight-through 3.5mm.
I really miss having a 3.5mm output on my phone...
I think it just adds friction (for measure, I feel audio jacks are pretty good)
So the real response is, "what's wrong with most companies to not provide the 3.5mm itself?"
It's good that xperia's doing this though. I think I still have phones which have 3.5mm itself so there isn't much to worry about. I think there are a lot of new phones which do offer it, I think both of my parents phones have support for 3.5mm by itself.
If you’re in the low percent running cabled headphones, you probably are also running a headphone amp if necessary or not which uses more cell phone power.
Now you need a usb->usb + 3.5mm to keep it charged up or an add on battery.
It seems nobody recalls how bad it was back in the day. CDMA phones (Mostly carriers like Alltel, Verizon and sprint.) did not have sim cards until 4g/LTE. Before that to migrate phones you had to get customer support involved.
AT&T and other GSM based carriers had sim cards on their phones and it was so much nicer.
Nobody has been able to convince me that esim is not just going back in time 15+ years. We moved to sim cards for a reason.
Totally different experience. Especially when traveling for work, being able to just show up in a country, download an app, and have a working local number within minutes is fantastic.
I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.
I've found this as well; totally painless to add a destination data plan just before jumping on the plane. And even switching my local plan was pretty straightforward when a promo offer came in from a competitor.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to be a hassle to switch to another phone if I couldn't get the old one powered on enough to run the esim transfer, much less the whole OS migration.
I recently bought a device through my carrier (secondary device, secondary carrier; luckily not my primary device) to replace my existing one.
Old device was still physical SIM new device only eSIM. I paid for it in a store, but it had to be shipped because they don’t have it in stock, even though it was in stock on their website (including after I left). It arrived late, the day before I was set to travel. The rep said I could just turn it on and follow the prompts and it would auto activated. It didn’t. Luckily it didn’t deactivate the old SIM. At least it didn’t until I called tech support and got their help. They said hang up, restart both devices, and the new one should work. Of course it didn’t work and both devices were now unusable. Had to go into a store and have them sort it out there.
On the flip side, being able to have a primary I never change and a secondary that I swap out for international travel has proven to be extremely valuable to me. So you take the bad with the good.
I love e-sims for travel and easy switching, but I also switched my primary number back from an e-sim to a physical sim after I realised what a pain it is to use it in another phone (my provider requires a fresh QR code sent by post to my registered address in order to do the switch - huge pain when my phone went in for repairs so I had to switch twice within two weeks, switching to a secondary phone, and then back to normal phone once it was repaired).
The problem with SIMs is that they aren't just credentials and config. They are full applications. Imagine if you needed to run a custom program to connect to every wifi network. It is bonkers. It is absurdly complex and insecure.
A "SIM" should just be a keypair. The subscriber use it to access the network.
It’s more complicated because it has to include logic about which network to connect to and how to tunnel back to the original provider (or partner) while roaming.
So it’s more like which network to connect to, fallback network selection logic and tunnel logic to get authorisation on a non-home network
Some random person I met dropped their phone in a river, just after arriving in a foreign country. He bought a new phone, but getting back to his phone number was not easy or possible for him (while in a foreign country). If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him. Instead he had to wait until he got home to pop in a new SIM card.
I learned from this experience that maybe eSIM is a good idea and I switched immediately upon hearing this person's story. Did I miss something?
I should have clarified that he dropped the phone in the river AND he did not attempt to get it back from the river, thus the SIM card is considered lost as well :)
> If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him.
Except many carriers have you jump through hoops to activate an eSIM on a new device. Here in the comments one person has to receive a new QR over snail mail.
well yeah, of course esim is shitty, as is everything imposed by big tech monopolies to their users without consulting or caring about what they really want. Did you think they were here for your wellbeing and not the money ?
eSIM is specifically designed to deny user freedom.
They are impossible to transfer from device to device by design, for one. Every single "transfer" has to be approved and signed off by a cellular provider in an online mode. They can deny it at will, or just neglect implementing it, and you can do nothing at all.
It's pretty clear that when GSMA talks of "security", they mean "security of the business models". What does that mean for the users? It means they're getting fucked.
esim.me, 9esim and "sysmocom eUICC for eSIM" are eSIMs in the SIM card form factor that you can load the SIM profiles onto and use them in any device with a SIM card slot (and of course transfer between devices). In my opinion, that's the best of both worlds.
I'll post an example for the parent just in case they are honestly confused about use cases. Here is one that happened to me. I had an eSIM on my iPhone. My iPhone broke (screen became somewhat unusable, and the phone was stuck in a restarting loop). It was an older model phone so I checked the repair cost and thought I'd rather buy a new one.
Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new phone, I needed the carrier to approve. But I was away from my home country and on roaming. So I tried to call them. They needed me to use a verification PIN they would send via SMS on the old phone, to verify the transfer to the new one. Impossible since the old phone is unusable.
Back in the day, I'd have just taken out the sim from the old phone and moved it to the new one. Easy peasy.
The only other option in this case now was to visit one of their stores thousands of miles away. Eventually just ended up doing that when I returned weeks later but during this time I could not access several services due to lack of access to my number plus 2 factor codes being sent there.
Moving a sim from phone to phone was seamless. Now the carrier needs to approve this swap. Even with two working phones sometimes it's a hassle and there will be delays while carriers decide to approve the move. There is a new feature that allows you to transfer eSIMs easily between phones but carriers seem to be holding onto their power in this regard and not every carrier will let their sims move so easily. This possibly requires regulators to step in and solve the issue - make it up to the user to move eSIMs. I would count on the EU to make this easier at some point.
On the plus side, eSIMs are nice to be able to signup and provision them through an app. Helps with travel and roaming. So there's that too.
this carrier approval to move esim problem is more generalized on modern “smartphones”. unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone. and a host of other authentication/authorization data is tied to the device in an opaque way. don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.
My telco requires that I receive an SMS on my eSIM to move it to new phone so... yeah.
It's amazing if the phone for whatever reason doesn't work and that then requires a long customer support call that might not work. The direct phone-to-phone transfter the devices offer is also blocked on the carrier.
Another issue I had was (travel) eSIMs failing to provision because the carrier didn't whitelist my phone brand/model. The QR code was spent, my money gone and customer support nowhere to be found.
I've never had such issues with pSIMs in decade before. It's ridiculous.
When I lost my phone with a physical sim, I had to go to the operator' office and answer a quiz about which three different numbers I've called and received and when exactly did that happened. Apparently I've failed and they demanded that I would bring a phone box with IMEI sticker on it (yes, the one which all "influencers" tell us we don't need to keep) and then they restored me my sim card. I imagine the same process would be required for the lost esim.
What country was this in? Quizzes and phone boxes sound.. odd. I've never heard of anything more complicated than rolling into your telco's nearest kiosk with your ID and them just provisioning a new one for you.
Lost phone was in Ukraine. We have both prepaid sim-cards and contract sim-cards. Contract would work like you've describes. Prepaid is more complicated.
My colleague had a very hard time moving her European esim (Play) from one iphone to another, because by then she moved from the city where she registered it initially. She had to come back in person and even then it only worked after a second visit, because she had to bring basically all her documents to verify her identity to the operator.
Meanwhile I just swapped boring old plastic card in a minute, while staying at home. I will stay away from esim for a while, maybe processes will mature in a few more years. At least until dual-sim phones are available.
I tried using a work eSIM as a secondary SIM to my personal physical SIM on my iPhone in 2022 or 2023. I was taken aback by how poor the experience was, both on the iOS level and the eSIM technology level. At that time I reckoned it's probably like 10 years too early and I don't think I will be giving an eSIM (primary or secondary) a shot sooner than in the 2030s.
Verizon (and their MVNOs) eSIMs are the worst. Registration is tied to IMEI and enforced via the eSIM's EID. You can't use one if those "physical" eSIMs because if you give Verizon a donor IMEI during registration, the EID of the eSIM doesn't match and activation is rejected.
My wife and I recently switched from T-Mobile to Noble Mobile and it was painless with an eSim. I didn’t have to try to track down my sim slot key, I didn’t have to go to the cell store or wait for a sim card in the mail, I just followed their onboarding instructions and made the new eSim my default. It took about 5 minutes.
As a counter-anecdote, I've had far more trouble over the years swapping physical SIMs than eSIMs. You'd think that going between two phones that use the same size card would just work, but in practice that isn't (wasn't?) always the case.
Never saw an issue moving a SIM from one phone to another (living in Asia, Europe and the US). However last week I got a Airalo E-Sim and apparently it's not possible to transfer it to my new phone.
eSIMs are perfect for travel. The only downside is that many phones still allow only one or two active eSIMs. Would be great to have all of them active - be able to receive SMS and calls at least.
What I don't get is that if he wants a physical sim and microsd card, why does he purchase a phone without those? By doing so you are confirming the phone manufacturers choosing to remove the physical sim cards that they made the right choice.
Personally I chose to purchase phones with physical sim card and microsd slots.
I guess maybe they're worse for professional phone reviewers, who switch phones all the time, but I'm not one. In my experience, I think about two-thirds of the time I've gotten a new phone and wanted to switch to it, the SIM card size had changed, so I needed to get a new one anyways, which could only be done by mail order, so took a few more days. And about half of the time the same SIM card did physically fit, something else went wrong, like the APN names wrong, carrier didn't want to let it activate, RCS failed to work, all of which are virtually impossible to troubleshoot. IMO, the dream of universal SIM card portability has been dead for at least a decade, if not longer, and started long before eSIMs came out.
The eSIM on my current phone Just Worked as far as activating. I haven't tried switching to a new phone with it yet, so I guess I'll have to see how well it works when that happens.
Clearly there are cases when both are better. eSIMs are nice for being able to switch carriers immediately, get set up in a new country you're visiting smoothly, and recover the number from a physically lost phone. Physical SIMs are nice if you want to try out a different phone model, assuming they support the same SIM size and you can find the little tool. And also if your phone is seriously damaged but not physically lost. So not everyone necessarily loves them, but I don't think it's a case of the big bad big tech companies are enshittifying everything.
I upgraded from an iPhone 11 to a 17 and was dreading having to sign in to my carrier’s web site to get an eSIM QR code. I was surprised to see that the phone migration process took care of that - at the end I had the new phone with an eSIM and my usual number, and the old phone with a deactivated SIM card. Super convenient.
Spending money to upgrade from model X-1 to the latest X is the well trodden happy path that big tech will actually make work. Author is describing less common workflows which do not receive the same attention and so become a mixed bag when the financial incentive is not so clear for the manufactures.
I am quite annoyed by the people who don't see the issue with eSim because "they never had an issue" with it. It's like having one murder down your block and stating that you don't see the issue because nobody attempted to murder you so far. ESim are backed up as part of iCloud backups, had one dodgy carrier in Europe (Lyca) who never activated my eSim so I switched back to a new carrier but I had to get a transfer authorization from Lyca. Guess what , since I was no longer a customer I was sent to hell by their customer support. Best joke that it was impossible to remove on my iPhone. It was part of the backup, a reset attempt did not solve it so I had to drive 200km to an Apple store to get a hard reset and the Apple genius advising me against restoring my data "otherwise it would retrieve the faulty ESIM back in your phone" !!!
> ESim are backed up as part of iCloud backups
You can’t actually backup an eSIM. If you could, they would be easy to clone. I know Apple uses that terminology, but that isn’t what is happening in the background. Same with transferring an eSIM. A new one is issued each time.
Given that this is a flag that the carrier has to explicitly set on the eSIM, you should blame the carriers that do this.
To be completely honest, if a hard reset removes the profile it should get reinstalled, it is actually not okay that a hard reset works.
Why is it like this? This is the way subsidized phones without physical sim work.
I occasionally buy travel data, and 3 of probably 8-ish instances had me on the phone with support for at least 20 minutes (and once an hour) to make an esim work. Perhaps the problem is android. But I've never had that experience with a physical sim. :shrug:
Yeah, eSIMs are built for high trust locations. I just use Google Fi and they’re pretty decent about it all. This whole “switching a carrier” business is kind of pointless busywork I don’t do any more.
Technologically, eSIMs are pretty nice. The electrical interface between the phone modem and the eSIM is the same as with a real SIM card, and the eSIM can run the same applications as a real SIM card, so at this point you can buy smartcards that can be swapped between devices and run eSIM applications. esim.me, 9esim and the "sysmocom eUICC for eSIM" (seems to be the most open/friendly at this point) are some of the options. Most of them offer an app for management, but there are also standardized interfaces.
SIM cards have always been secure elements that the provider trusts. With an eSIM, you can already own that secure element and the provider can provision it with their application. You can even have the applications from multiple providers on the same physical secure element.
The major advantage is now that the expensive and time-consuming part of provisioning a new mobile service (sending out a physical SIM card) can be replaced with a few standardized API calls. This is cheaper (which makes the extra cost some providers charge for an eSIM look quite silly) and a lot quicker, which enables new business models for short-lived cell connection services.
A world where all cell service providers offered eSIMs would be slightly nicer. But manufacturers removing the option of swapping the secure element is very annoying at the same time.
The spec allows carriers to disallow removal of an eSIM, to allow for subsidized phone business models (in other words: this change was demanded by the carriers). So you should blame the carrier, not the manufacturer that simply implements the spec.
It might be nice if manufacturers implement a HUUGE LOUD warning when enabling an eSIM that requires carrier authorization to remove though. Someone should put that in the Android bug tracker.
I think the major advantage for consumers is being able to securely ensure their cards never breaks and device restarts make their sim always available, no need for pin. Even if someone steals your phone they can’t disable your SIM card unless you don’t have a pincode.
I’ve had a SIM card constantly fail and require me to put my pin to unlock it multiple times in the same day. If someone wanted to call me they would not be able to because I didn’t know it was off.
eSIM is also great for travel. There's a lot of competition on price and it's easy to check esimdb to find the cheapest carrier that meets your needs for a given trip. Download the eSIM in advance and you're good to go as soon as your plane lands
> We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card.
Some people might have given it up. I personally own a Sony Xperia phone, and intend to buy another Xperia next year, which will almost certainly still have both. In fact Sony is the one manufacturer that returned to a headphone jack after having removed it for a while. It might be more expensive than the competition, but this is my voting with my wallet.
Do note that unfortunately any future devices by Sony are just phones by other manufacturers that are just Sony branded. Sony stopped their first party device manufacturing, so your mileage of the hardware might be wildly different in the future.
Most phones that cost less than ~300 USD still have a headphone jack and microSD slot.
I've never understood spending more than that on a phone anyway, you can't exactly use all that processing power on a phone operating system. Unfortunately some of the bad features from expensive phones have been moving down to the cheaper ones, like the destroyed screen that's missing its corners and has a hole for the camera in it for some reason.
I just bought a newer phone and was surprised to see even the ~$200 Samsungs were lacking a headphone jack. That threw them right out of contention, so I ended up getting a 2024-model Motorola (the 2025s were $50 more and reviews said they offered no meaningful performance boost).
I've rocked pixels for a good while now, but the Xperia lineup has always been something I've really debated.
My largest concern is camera quality: obviously it is Sony, but if you wouldn't mind, could you elaborate on their camera 'stack' a bit (esp. in relation to pixel phones if you have first hand experience...).
TIL that the Xperia line is still alive and kicking. Sweet phones!
Unforunately they're "downscaling" their operations in Europe, so I guess they're having trouble competing with other phones: https://www.gsmarena.com/is_sony_pulling_its_smartphone_busi...
what is it that keeps you loyal to xperia?
But why? What's wrong with Bluetooth?
The way its bandwidth is too low to broadcast and receive at high quality at the same time meaning everyone calling into the zoom call with their fancy airpods sound like they're calling from the other side of the moon while my 5$ plug-in earbuds sound like a damn recording studio in comparison.
Worse quality, latency, potential to lose one (or both) earbuds, having to faff with batteries and charging and cases (and charging the charging case) when I can just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears. The knotting is a small price to pay for the improved quality and convenience in every other way.
What's wrong with analogue audio?
Something I read recently which I think is interesting food for thought:
Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?
Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators
Shouldn't it be the same thing? You either have the DAC on your phone convert the digital music file to an analog signal and send it over the aux cord to the speakers in the headphones, or have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right? It's not like you're plugging your headphones into a record player.
> have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right
This is not how Bluetooth wireless audio works. PCM audio is re-encoded on-device into any one of a few Bluetooth-capable codecs that is then streamed to the client device. This is a primary cause of latency.
Interesting, thanks
latency is absolute killer. then there's also the fact that splitting the output is difficult, pairing (especially multi-pairing) is finicky
but the real response is "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"
> what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter
In my experience the connection is much easier to accidentally break through movement (e.g., walking) with a USB-C adapter than straight-through 3.5mm.
I really miss having a 3.5mm output on my phone...
> what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter
I think it just adds friction (for measure, I feel audio jacks are pretty good)
So the real response is, "what's wrong with most companies to not provide the 3.5mm itself?"
It's good that xperia's doing this though. I think I still have phones which have 3.5mm itself so there isn't much to worry about. I think there are a lot of new phones which do offer it, I think both of my parents phones have support for 3.5mm by itself.
If you’re in the low percent running cabled headphones, you probably are also running a headphone amp if necessary or not which uses more cell phone power.
Now you need a usb->usb + 3.5mm to keep it charged up or an add on battery.
> "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"
I want to charge and listen to music at the same time.
In my experience, wired earphones/headphones are better for latency in rythm games.
It seems nobody recalls how bad it was back in the day. CDMA phones (Mostly carriers like Alltel, Verizon and sprint.) did not have sim cards until 4g/LTE. Before that to migrate phones you had to get customer support involved.
AT&T and other GSM based carriers had sim cards on their phones and it was so much nicer.
Nobody has been able to convince me that esim is not just going back in time 15+ years. We moved to sim cards for a reason.
I agree, although two counterpoints. One is that carriers would just lock the phones in the US anyway. Second is that eSIM is easier while traveling.
Totally different experience. Especially when traveling for work, being able to just show up in a country, download an app, and have a working local number within minutes is fantastic.
I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.
I've found this as well; totally painless to add a destination data plan just before jumping on the plane. And even switching my local plan was pretty straightforward when a promo offer came in from a competitor.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to be a hassle to switch to another phone if I couldn't get the old one powered on enough to run the esim transfer, much less the whole OS migration.
I recently bought a device through my carrier (secondary device, secondary carrier; luckily not my primary device) to replace my existing one. Old device was still physical SIM new device only eSIM. I paid for it in a store, but it had to be shipped because they don’t have it in stock, even though it was in stock on their website (including after I left). It arrived late, the day before I was set to travel. The rep said I could just turn it on and follow the prompts and it would auto activated. It didn’t. Luckily it didn’t deactivate the old SIM. At least it didn’t until I called tech support and got their help. They said hang up, restart both devices, and the new one should work. Of course it didn’t work and both devices were now unusable. Had to go into a store and have them sort it out there.
On the flip side, being able to have a primary I never change and a secondary that I swap out for international travel has proven to be extremely valuable to me. So you take the bad with the good.
in some countries (ex china) local carriers won’t provision esim for nonlocally made phones. including iPhone not specifically made for their market.
I love e-sims for travel and easy switching, but I also switched my primary number back from an e-sim to a physical sim after I realised what a pain it is to use it in another phone (my provider requires a fresh QR code sent by post to my registered address in order to do the switch - huge pain when my phone went in for repairs so I had to switch twice within two weeks, switching to a secondary phone, and then back to normal phone once it was repaired).
The problem with SIMs is that they aren't just credentials and config. They are full applications. Imagine if you needed to run a custom program to connect to every wifi network. It is bonkers. It is absurdly complex and insecure.
A "SIM" should just be a keypair. The subscriber use it to access the network.
It’s more complicated because it has to include logic about which network to connect to and how to tunnel back to the original provider (or partner) while roaming.
So it’s more like which network to connect to, fallback network selection logic and tunnel logic to get authorisation on a non-home network
Some random person I met dropped their phone in a river, just after arriving in a foreign country. He bought a new phone, but getting back to his phone number was not easy or possible for him (while in a foreign country). If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him. Instead he had to wait until he got home to pop in a new SIM card.
I learned from this experience that maybe eSIM is a good idea and I switched immediately upon hearing this person's story. Did I miss something?
If you damage your phone, as opposed to completely loosing it, the sim card is almost never damaged.
So changing phones can be done without any customer support or web forms or calls to service provider etc.
Actually, every phone I ever had eventually got replaced this way, I am still using the original sim card from years ago.
I should have clarified that he dropped the phone in the river AND he did not attempt to get it back from the river, thus the SIM card is considered lost as well :)
> If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him.
Except many carriers have you jump through hoops to activate an eSIM on a new device. Here in the comments one person has to receive a new QR over snail mail.
Indeed I became aware thanks to this thread!
For me it was 10 mins through my provider's app (and I was also doing it internationally)
A colleague of mine was in a similar situation except he had an eSIM. It didn’t help because AT&T would not provision him a new eSIM internationally.
As another anecdotal data point, I was able to switch phones internationally using a physical SIM by just putting it in the new phone.
Title should read "I had to switch to eSim [...]"
well yeah, of course esim is shitty, as is everything imposed by big tech monopolies to their users without consulting or caring about what they really want. Did you think they were here for your wellbeing and not the money ?
eSIM is specifically designed to deny user freedom.
They are impossible to transfer from device to device by design, for one. Every single "transfer" has to be approved and signed off by a cellular provider in an online mode. They can deny it at will, or just neglect implementing it, and you can do nothing at all.
It's pretty clear that when GSMA talks of "security", they mean "security of the business models". What does that mean for the users? It means they're getting fucked.
esim.me, 9esim and "sysmocom eUICC for eSIM" are eSIMs in the SIM card form factor that you can load the SIM profiles onto and use them in any device with a SIM card slot (and of course transfer between devices). In my opinion, that's the best of both worlds.
It's good, but they're expensive as fuck for what they are.
The best option would be a software-only eSIM with full transfer support, IMO. But we don't have that, because GSMA says we can't have nice things.
What would be the use case for that?
What would be the use case of being able to transfer a SIM card from one device to another at will, you mean? What kind of question is that.
I'll post an example for the parent just in case they are honestly confused about use cases. Here is one that happened to me. I had an eSIM on my iPhone. My iPhone broke (screen became somewhat unusable, and the phone was stuck in a restarting loop). It was an older model phone so I checked the repair cost and thought I'd rather buy a new one.
Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new phone, I needed the carrier to approve. But I was away from my home country and on roaming. So I tried to call them. They needed me to use a verification PIN they would send via SMS on the old phone, to verify the transfer to the new one. Impossible since the old phone is unusable.
Back in the day, I'd have just taken out the sim from the old phone and moved it to the new one. Easy peasy.
The only other option in this case now was to visit one of their stores thousands of miles away. Eventually just ended up doing that when I returned weeks later but during this time I could not access several services due to lack of access to my number plus 2 factor codes being sent there.
Moving a sim from phone to phone was seamless. Now the carrier needs to approve this swap. Even with two working phones sometimes it's a hassle and there will be delays while carriers decide to approve the move. There is a new feature that allows you to transfer eSIMs easily between phones but carriers seem to be holding onto their power in this regard and not every carrier will let their sims move so easily. This possibly requires regulators to step in and solve the issue - make it up to the user to move eSIMs. I would count on the EU to make this easier at some point.
On the plus side, eSIMs are nice to be able to signup and provision them through an app. Helps with travel and roaming. So there's that too.
this carrier approval to move esim problem is more generalized on modern “smartphones”. unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone. and a host of other authentication/authorization data is tied to the device in an opaque way. don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.
Probably one most people never ask, though should be obvious to those on this forum.
My telco requires that I receive an SMS on my eSIM to move it to new phone so... yeah.
It's amazing if the phone for whatever reason doesn't work and that then requires a long customer support call that might not work. The direct phone-to-phone transfter the devices offer is also blocked on the carrier.
Another issue I had was (travel) eSIMs failing to provision because the carrier didn't whitelist my phone brand/model. The QR code was spent, my money gone and customer support nowhere to be found.
I've never had such issues with pSIMs in decade before. It's ridiculous.
> requires that I receive an SMS on my eSIM to move it to new phone
So there's no CS path for lost/stolen/destroyed phones? That doesn't make sense, I'm sure it's a very frequent occurrence.
It's "call us" which is interesting to do without a working SIM. :)
When I lost my phone with a physical sim, I had to go to the operator' office and answer a quiz about which three different numbers I've called and received and when exactly did that happened. Apparently I've failed and they demanded that I would bring a phone box with IMEI sticker on it (yes, the one which all "influencers" tell us we don't need to keep) and then they restored me my sim card. I imagine the same process would be required for the lost esim.
What country was this in? Quizzes and phone boxes sound.. odd. I've never heard of anything more complicated than rolling into your telco's nearest kiosk with your ID and them just provisioning a new one for you.
Lost phone was in Ukraine. We have both prepaid sim-cards and contract sim-cards. Contract would work like you've describes. Prepaid is more complicated.
My colleague had a very hard time moving her European esim (Play) from one iphone to another, because by then she moved from the city where she registered it initially. She had to come back in person and even then it only worked after a second visit, because she had to bring basically all her documents to verify her identity to the operator.
Meanwhile I just swapped boring old plastic card in a minute, while staying at home. I will stay away from esim for a while, maybe processes will mature in a few more years. At least until dual-sim phones are available.
I tried using a work eSIM as a secondary SIM to my personal physical SIM on my iPhone in 2022 or 2023. I was taken aback by how poor the experience was, both on the iOS level and the eSIM technology level. At that time I reckoned it's probably like 10 years too early and I don't think I will be giving an eSIM (primary or secondary) a shot sooner than in the 2030s.
Verizon (and their MVNOs) eSIMs are the worst. Registration is tied to IMEI and enforced via the eSIM's EID. You can't use one if those "physical" eSIMs because if you give Verizon a donor IMEI during registration, the EID of the eSIM doesn't match and activation is rejected.
My wife and I recently switched from T-Mobile to Noble Mobile and it was painless with an eSim. I didn’t have to try to track down my sim slot key, I didn’t have to go to the cell store or wait for a sim card in the mail, I just followed their onboarding instructions and made the new eSim my default. It took about 5 minutes.
> I didn’t have to try to track down my sim slot key,
This made me laugh.
Why? Because you can use pretty much any slim pointy object you can find?
Yeah, pretty much.
As a counter-anecdote, I've had far more trouble over the years swapping physical SIMs than eSIMs. You'd think that going between two phones that use the same size card would just work, but in practice that isn't (wasn't?) always the case.
Never saw an issue moving a SIM from one phone to another (living in Asia, Europe and the US). However last week I got a Airalo E-Sim and apparently it's not possible to transfer it to my new phone.
My min spec requirements for a phone are 5G, physical dual SIM support, and a 3.5mm audio jack
eSIMs are perfect for travel. The only downside is that many phones still allow only one or two active eSIMs. Would be great to have all of them active - be able to receive SMS and calls at least.
Same as passkeys
What I don't get is that if he wants a physical sim and microsd card, why does he purchase a phone without those? By doing so you are confirming the phone manufacturers choosing to remove the physical sim cards that they made the right choice.
Personally I chose to purchase phones with physical sim card and microsd slots.
The author works for a tech blog, and has to review new phones.
I disagree with the overall point of the article.
I guess maybe they're worse for professional phone reviewers, who switch phones all the time, but I'm not one. In my experience, I think about two-thirds of the time I've gotten a new phone and wanted to switch to it, the SIM card size had changed, so I needed to get a new one anyways, which could only be done by mail order, so took a few more days. And about half of the time the same SIM card did physically fit, something else went wrong, like the APN names wrong, carrier didn't want to let it activate, RCS failed to work, all of which are virtually impossible to troubleshoot. IMO, the dream of universal SIM card portability has been dead for at least a decade, if not longer, and started long before eSIMs came out.
The eSIM on my current phone Just Worked as far as activating. I haven't tried switching to a new phone with it yet, so I guess I'll have to see how well it works when that happens.
Clearly there are cases when both are better. eSIMs are nice for being able to switch carriers immediately, get set up in a new country you're visiting smoothly, and recover the number from a physically lost phone. Physical SIMs are nice if you want to try out a different phone model, assuming they support the same SIM size and you can find the little tool. And also if your phone is seriously damaged but not physically lost. So not everyone necessarily loves them, but I don't think it's a case of the big bad big tech companies are enshittifying everything.
Main as traditional sim, esim for travel.
eSIMs are another way for big tech and government to track and identify you. Gone will be the days you could pop into a shop and get a burner.
I had zero issue upgrading my iPhone from one eSIM device to the next. In fact, I even forgot that I had to do anything, it just did it.
I upgraded from an iPhone 11 to a 17 and was dreading having to sign in to my carrier’s web site to get an eSIM QR code. I was surprised to see that the phone migration process took care of that - at the end I had the new phone with an eSIM and my usual number, and the old phone with a deactivated SIM card. Super convenient.
Spending money to upgrade from model X-1 to the latest X is the well trodden happy path that big tech will actually make work. Author is describing less common workflows which do not receive the same attention and so become a mixed bag when the financial incentive is not so clear for the manufactures.