Comment by Grombobulous
12 hours ago
After switching providers with a recent phone with eSIM, I would say I’d never want to go back to physical SIMs ever again.
They’re going to go away worldwide eventually, they’re just more easily removed in the US where the carriers are more bleeding edge on features and there are only 3 providers to think about in a very large homogenous market.
The difference between waiting for a SIM card to arrive in the mail or traveling to a store, fiddling with a paperclip, tray, and impossibly tiny nano-SIM versus switching providers in 10 minutes via an app is night and day.
Most SIM/dual SIM solutions also involve removing both SIM cards at once even to swap out one of two, and they tend to require device restarts.
In the past I’ve also had network problems as a result of bad/damaged SIM cards.
You seem to forget that moving an eSIM between phones isn't nearly as straightforward as moving a physical SIM, and often must be requested or approved by the carrier. If for some reason you intend to use the same SIM in various phones for one reason or another, it's a huge inconvenience.
Technically, the same thing can happen with a physical SIM. I tried that with a Nexus 5X on Verizon and that's how I learned their network has an allowlist system.
How does the carrier even know what phone you are going to use? My last SIM was bought in store at T Mobile, for cash, and I can freely move between phones. I never buy phones from carriers. My Pixel as bought directly from Google and immediately flashed with Graphene.
2 replies →
Can I switch out an eSIM while running an AOSP based ROM yet (ie no proprietary userspace)? Last time I checked (several years ago) it didn't seem to be possible. Did that change?
ooo I can't wait for the CDMA carrier locking boogaloo all over again.