what's the migration process for eSIMs?
You can transfer the sim but it needs to be activated on the other phone. I have even seen reactivation charges of €5.
Oh, you do? It's still a single point of failure. Customer support servers down? Should have gotten a physical SIM.
Unbeatable servers? Good luck swapping eSIMs when you want to sell/throw away your phone abroad, out of range of internet. Should have gotten a phyical one.
Never out of range? Wonder what you do when your phone breaks and you have no one to babysit you through the process. Should have gotten physical.
Etc.
That's what an additional sigle point of failure means: less control over your own infrastructure.
New technologies often improve things in some way while introducing concerns and potential drawbacks in other ways. The question is whether, on balance, the new way is worth the risk.
My experience so far is that it is — it’s very convenient to be able to use a service like Airalo to order prepaid eSIMs for data service in foreign countries in advance. It makes traveling a joy now, and my wife is irritated a whole lot less by the prepaid SIM hunt I used to go on when traveling abroad. Plus no more tools or risking losing your SIM tray (or the SIM itself) when you swap it out on an airplane tray table.
My experience says that it will get steamrolled and the 1% left hanging, looking at significantly worse solutions, or none altogether.
I know we all hate telcos and mobile phone carriers -- and a lot of their mistrust is quite frankly deserved -- but this seems like an edge case that most customers won't even run into. First they need to switch devices, which eliminates most customers, and then second, they need to experience some kind of failure on switch. If the failure rate is any higher than before, I would be surprised. But let's wait to see the data before we all go up in arms.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212780
eSIMs also have the advantage of an activation card can be sent instantly from almost anywhere (it’s a QR code) which is great if your phone (and physical sim) are lost or damaged.
“Some” is true afaik. It’s at the providers discretion.
AFAIK it’s also only possible if you’re moving from iPhone to iPhone, not if you’re moving to an Android. I’m not certain moving back and forth between multiple phones is easily supported.
I like e-sims in general, but this is a downside for some use cases.
Now, we‘re on a business contract and we have a responsive team on the other side, so the comfort of this hinges on the provider obviously.
One operator even charges 10€ for a new QR code for your eSIM (same price as getting a new physical SIM card).
I recently bought a temporary SIM in the US during my holidays (StraightTalk) and was surprised that you can only use the physical SIM after you register online with you IMEI. I haven't checked, but I imagine that after that the card would only work with that IMEI.
Fortunately, I don't think this is a practice in Europe.
I really hope that it's because they are awful and this is not the typical American mobile phone experience.
It's probably intentional. I was reading an article in the French press the other day [0] on the subject. Some head of something or other in the industry said they were weary of mostly Apple, Samsung, and Google starting to like playing the providers and removing the actual carriers from the users' psyche. "The SIM card is the last physical link between the carrier and the client".
I've also checked my carrier's site for getting an esim. Apparently I'd have to pay the same amount to get one as for a physical one (minus delivery costs). But at least, contrary to some other commenters' situation, they seem to allow you to move it from phone to phone as long as you hold on to your qr code. They, of course, don't offer the option of storing it in the "secure" client area.
[0] https://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/avec-l-esim-la-car...
Yes, but what does that tell us? How is that useful? All you've done is point out a situation where the happy path works. If you have a great carrier whose systems are working correctly then it's going to be fine. That's what you'd expect. No one really cares about the cases where things go right. They're boring. They should be boring. The problem is never what happens when it works, but what happens when it doesn't work.
I've spent the past two and a half decades learning that the happy path is the least interesting part of any system. Building a working app is about 10% of the work of building anything. The other 90% is error handling, designing processes to get things back on track, and managing when things change. If you focus on the bit that works, and you assume that things will work, and that any human part of the system works (where code is written by humans) it is bound to break at some point.
The issue here is that taking a physical sim card works and dropping it in a different handset has far fewer moving parts and it's all stuff that's been proven over the past 30 years. There is less to go wrong. As soon as you start adding carriers and their shitty websites into the mix things will screw up for a non-trivial number of users.
All indications so far are that eSIMs work quite well. Plus it’s pretty awesome to be able to purchase prepaid service through a company like Airalo when traveling abroad and to be able to use it instantly. Same goes for switching carriers.
Generally speaking, leaving something to see if it'll work means it's too late to change things easily if doesn't work. Managing change is one of the hardest things to do in any company, let alone industry, so finding the problems during the testing phase is really important. If it gets to the consumer and things aren't working (which happens a lot) that means people screwed up.
Buying a local sim card and putting it in your phone when you're travelling works fine, and instantly, so eSIMs aren't offering any advantage there besides not needing to go to a local shop.
eSIMs are incredibly user-hostile because they switch the ownership of a SIM card from the customer to the provider, so you're completely at their mercy if you need to transfer over your SIM card from one device to another. And Apple facilitates this.
When your phone breaks, that's not a easy task.
https://support.apple.com/en-hk/HT209086
Personally I'd love for eSIM to be there in ADDITION but not replacing the nano SIMs.
Now you might retort aha! See! In a very narrow set of circumstances.. let me cut you off, look, you're going to need to remember to bring a paperclip or sim tool to do it the old fashioned way anyhow. So you're remembering something. If you're an amnesic lost in the woods you got bigger problems.
Besides, those are 2 grams of weight savings in my ultra light backpacking setup!
My old phone is still logged in to Apple, still works, still holds a charge. I'd like some eSIM system that was as convenient as "phone dies, pull SIM, put in old phone, boot".
If we disregard the fact that many older but still usable phones don’t support e-sim (which was the original point), what do you mean ”just” download the e-sim?
At least in my country, getting an e-sim is a pretty involved process which requires secure authentication, and specifically in my case that authentication would be gone with the now-broken phone if one didn’t have the foresight to have a backup (which many people do not).
If you have a physical sim, you can move it to almost any (unlocked) mobile phone in existence (at least in Europe) and at most you’ll need the PIN/PUK.
Of course, this goes the other way as well if you drop your phone in the ocean for example, provided you have alternate authentication and a compatible phone, e-sim will have you up and running again much faster.
Password to Flex itself is in my 1password db. If that gets compromised I'd have way bigger problems than cloned phone number.
Carriers are the real problem here, not letting you easily switch between a physical SIM and an eSIM in case that happens. Some do, but you usually have to call up, there are delays, etc. Ideally it would be an easy switch in their web admin panel.
I couldn't imagine them jumping on the esim train in any useful way in the near term.
It’s actually the scenario that finally convinced me that eSIM was a good idea.
Yes, you can get service for that price. It has paltry data allowances compared to what OP is describing.
In plenty of countries if you try buying straight from a local provider you can’t buy low amount of data or have to get voice with it. Meanwhile Airalo allows you to buy 1, 5 or 10GB for very cheap and topping up is pushing a button in their app.
I meant it when I said it was insanely more convenient.
Easier to get online in a new country if you don’t have to first seek out a physical SIM card. Plus you keep your home SIM secure in the phone where there’s no danger of losing it.
Instead, just get on WiFi when you arrive, take your pick of cheap offers, and download the eSIM directly to your phone.
> ”I couldn't imagine them jumping on the esim train in any useful way in the near term.”
Depends on the country. Thailand, for example, is very eSIM friendly. But there’s plenty of “developed” countries in Europe where eSIMs are almost unheard of.
Or before you even get there.
When I landed I made a one off 400 yen payment, like tree fiffdy or something, and immediately had data working right at the airport for the rest of the month. Apple Pay, one off, no contracts, no queues, no diligent service people. It saved probably 1 hour of my life! And it is somehow significantly cheaper (depends on the country, ymmv).
Frankly I pity people who get off a long flight and wait in line to get an overpriced piece of plastic to stick in their phones like it is 1823.
Also moving a eSIM from iOS device to non-iOS device (for example to plug into my secondary Android) is a massive PITA. I always have to re-issue the SIM which I often can't do and need to jumps through customer support queries and hoops. My current provider back home doesn't even give me the option to do it while abroad and support told me to come back for a day, then finish the eSIM reissuing application, so I'm stuck with the physical SIM anyway.
eSIMs will be great one day, but that day is not now. I much rather pop the SIM out of phone 1 and move it into phone 2, or iPad when I want, than wait hours (or sometimes days) to get a new eSIM approved, and repeat that process every single time I want to move a connection to another device
Now? People can switch carriers while in their living room. Takes a matter of minutes. Absolutely frictionless.