People enforcing SMS login/MFA don't care. As someone who's frequently away my home country, I often find it difficult to log into services that are necessary for my survival (like banking), let alone regular apps which more and more frequently are ditching email address signup in favour of mobile numbers (BeReal, Artifact etc).

At _minimum_ I need to swap the physical SIM card in my phone which for some reason breaks iMessage for a few days every time I do it. However roaming doesn't work in every country, so, sometimes I'm just fucked.

eSIM could make the first problem easier, but it actually makes it harder. With a physical SIM, if I lose or break my phone I still have my home SIM so I can still access SMS on a new phone. With eSIM, if I lose or break my phone my home SIM is lost along with it. No problem, just provision a new eSIM, that's the whole point right? Well, one of my telcos doesn't support eSIM yet, but they enforce SMS MFA, so I can see where this is going. I'll only be able to provision a new sim if I have access to the old one. Absolutely braindead. Another of my telcos doesn't allow eSIMs to be provisioned digitally; you need to obtain a physical QR code from a shop or have it posted to an address within the country (they won't send one overseas). It's actually unbelievable how telcos have managed to make eSIMs less convenient than physical SIMs. Anyway, this means I need to return to my home country if I lose or break my phone because without SMS I won't be able to access banking.

This is beyond infuriating, but I'm an edge case so no one cares. It should be illegal for critical services, banking/finance/govt etc to depend on SMS.

Do you get charged for _receiving_ texts when traveling internationally? Maybe it's different here in Europe, but as far as I know, I only get charged for active things - sending texts, making calls, accepting calls. Passive things - receiving texts, getting calls (but not accepting them) - do not incur any charges.

It depends on the telco. I have a telco that requires me to have an active roaming plan to receive SMS/calls. Which is about $5 a day from memory (I don’t use it overseas). Another telco has no requirements and no charge to receive SMS/calls overseas as long as the number is active.