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.

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.

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.

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.

I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.

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 ?

Once this phone needs updating, I’ll be swapping carrier to one that has regular SIM cards.

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.

Various people and the article have outlined some bad experiences but to give a contrasting example: Digital Republic, a local MVNO here in Switzerland, allows you to replace your eSIM by simply logging into their web portal with TOTP-based 2FA and clicking a button. No SMS, no contact with support, no reidentification.

In theory, all carriers could do this.

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.

Couldn’t set up easily because no wifi

then I just simply could not cancel the damn thing… It required being in Australia, and like the article needed a SMS code and the support was only contactable Australian working hours… who wanted the SMS code again.

So once back in Blighty there was no way… had to cancel the credit card to stop payments

So you are at the mercy of the competence of the provider

A "SIM" should just be a keypair. The subscriber use it to access the network.

Also, if I would drop my phone and break it I can simply remove the SIM and stick it in a backup phone. Can't do that with an esim either without the carrier cooperating.

Luckily all my current used phones still have two sim slots. It's something I select for but I'm sure eventually it will become harder.

Sure for a one month travel SIM it's super handy but I don't want it for my main number.

But then on Sprint, they tried to copy the CDMA activation system on LTE whereas everyone else just used SIM cards directly. Sprint was very progressive on eSIM even if they were slow to VoLTE.

My Pixel 3 moved to a physical SIM due to switching to T-Mobile 3 months before the merger, and I've mostly used physical SIMs before the Pixel 10 Pro outside of international travel. I avoid MVNOs as my primary service because of the specter of eSIM-only phones, and that was pre-Pixel 10.

And yes, if my Pixel 10 Pro had a physical SIM card slot I'd use it.

With physical sims, only your carrier has the encryption keys to be able to provision (and run e.g. a java program on the sim). With esims, that is not as tightly controlled. Coworker recommended I read about the "sim jacker" exploit, but I have not yet. If anyone is curious, I pass it along.

And I know what you might think: Isn't that defeating the purpose? No, it is not. I can recive a digital simcard activation, render it on a physical card and use it in any phone. Thats perfect.

And yes, once the phones without a sim-card slot come ... we'll see.

Its going to take congressional action before we can get rid of this menace. All we're doing is half-ass offloading credit and identity checks to cellphone carriers, which do this, and by having a cell phone, you've probably been through an identity and credit check.

Seems like most of the complaints in here re: eSIM are around how a specific carrier deals with it and less about the technology itself?

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?

Personally I chose to purchase phones with physical sim card and microsd slots.

My father recently had a problem w/ the phone showing SIM-related error messages. He called the carrier and they "helpfully" switched him to an eSIM.

The best laid plans... >sigh<

If I can’t take my esim away from a phone and plug it to another one as easy as physical sim - there is zero point in having this bullshit. Just link my cell plan to IMEI or something.

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.