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Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret (arstechnica.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 27 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Those of us who swap SIMs when travelling are also affected. I travel outside my country several times a year and must say that eSIMs sound like a good idea until you actually deal with them. Spending vacation time debugging an eSIM is an annoying distraction.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Can't your phone store multiple esims? I thought that was actually one of the selling points of the stuff.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    It's a software implementation though, so if you have a rooted phone or use another Android OS, you have limited options in apps that implement eSim for you.

    OpenEUICC is a good one, but sometimes requires magisk modules to work.

    I remember it took me half a day of fiddling to get my eSim working under Lineage.

    People forget that your phone supporting "feature X" means that even though it has all the hardware to do X, it still needs to software, which might not be part of the devicetree.

    For example paying for items with your phone's NFC does not happen because of NFC capability. There are no open source solutions to Google Pay. It's an agreement brokered between Google and Banks that allow the bankcard to be "cloned" and used via NFC, not the NFC doing any cloning of your actual bankcard

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    It can, but both my Fairphone and old pixel could have a physical sim and an eSIM. I daily drive both with my old US number and my current EU number. Can't have two active eSIM cards at once though

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  • [+] -7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    This never happens

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    My parents came to visit my over xmas and installed Airalo to get a local SIM. Activation failed, the support AI bot re-issued the eSIM, activation failed again, it got escalated to human support, they asked for a refund, and 12 hours later randomly the phone popped up an "eSIM activated!" message. That would have sucked if you actually relied on needing the SIM on landing.

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