- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
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eSIM is really hard to change device in Taiwan due to government (NCC Department) “instructions” (that carrier sometimes misinterpreted it):
- Can not transfer by yourself, you need to go to carrier to transfer.
- 300 NTD (~10 USD) per move (can be waived under some cases)
- Might deny if you move too often recently.
And now (actually start few days ago), you need to show proof of purchase (or gift) of the target device. Carrier can deny if you fail to do so, and they’ll say they’re following government instructions.NCC said it should not be applied to eSIM as it’s one-time use only, but such rule already executed for few days and caused troubles for some people.
So physical SIM is more flexible here. (For now)
EDIT: NCC Department said the instructions are just suggestions, carrier should do KYC properly, but how all major ones do the same annoying stuff is beyond me…
EDIT 2: NCC Department clarified the new KYC instructions. (Chinese) 媒體揭露KYC指引相關報導恐有誤解，NCC今日邀集三大電信業者溝通說明，持續滾動因應實務情形
is it possible to back up an esim to a computer file (USB) and then restore it on a new phone?
Depends on the provider. Many only allow a single use of the provisioning code.
Some providers does however let you create a new one whenever (meant to be used when you replace devices)
This is a problem for somebody reviewing phones, but how much of a problem is it actually for the average user who will change phones once every few years? And will probably be doing so at a phone store where they can support it.
I haven’t been to a phone store in 15 years
I’m fairness the only time I remember being in a phone store in the last decade was because I got an esim when I got my new phone, phone company didn’t send me a qr code to get the esim and I lost access to my account because I couldn’t receive an SMS because my old physical SIM was disabled.
I go to a phone store every time I get a new phone!
checks when my last phone was bought… 2018
I go to a phone store every six or seven years!
6,7!
Kill me, kill me slowly.
Last time I went into a store was 3 years ago, specifically looking for an iPhone 13 mini as an upgrade to my iPhone XR. They didn’t have any in stock, attempted to sell me a few different, more expensive devices, then just told me to try online.
Ended up going with a different provider.
It is also a problem for us IT guys, when we need to migrate users from one phone to another it is super annoying to deal with eSIMs
That’s odd, I just swapped phones. Old phone was eSIM, it literally couldn’t have been easier.
The issue is often that the phones take a long time to download the apps the user needs, most of our users are on the go, and can’t rely wifi, so they need mobile data, with a physical SIM we can easily tell them how to swap on their own, it is done in 10-15s, and can quickly be moved back, with an eSIM you have to dig through menus and hope it works, if not, the user is left with two phones without a SIM.
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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.
Can’t your phone store multiple esims? I thought that was actually one of the selling points of the stuff.
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
That’s not a problem with eSims, that’s just a problem with your custom ROM not shipping with absolutely basic functionality
Much more likely to be the phone vendor not releasing this “absolutely basic functionality” to customisers. Some vendors hate their customers having freedoms.
I don’t think it was a basic problem, but something to do with vendor’s implementation of it not being in the device tree and so it could not just be copied over as a binary blob
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
I buy eSIMs every two months when I travel. I only had issues when I fucked it up by deleting one myself. I’m on eSIM like 20
This never happens
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.
For me the main benefit of eSIMs is they allow multiple numbers on a single phone which is super handy.
Reading the article though, and I think the described problem is entirely the fault of the carrier and not the design of eSIMs. The carrier should have allowed alternative verification methods (email, online account, in-person at store) other than just sending a text to the disabled number.
It’s like everyone forgot what a pain in the ass it used to be when Verizon was cdma and didn’t use sim cards.
Or much of the world never had a similar malfunctioning telco.
I don’t have Verizon in my country. Not sure who this ‘everyone’ is and what they’re forgetting.
When a mobile carrier needs to verify your identity for an account change, they all do the same thing: send a text message. And what happens if you don’t have a working SIM? That’s right—nothing. Without access to my account or phone number, I was stuck with no way to download a new eSIM. The only course of action was to go to a physical store to download an electronic SIM card. What should have been 30 seconds of fiddling with a piece of plastic turned into an hour standing around a retail storefront.
The screen died on my wife’s iPhone, fine I have other spare iPhones aplenty she can switch to. But at some point she had accepted a prompt on the iPhone to switch to eSIM so we couldn’t just move a physical SIM over, you had to go through the “transfer eSIM” menus, which we couldn’t do because the screen was dead. The only option the carrier gave us was going to a physical store.
I’m never switching my main carrier to eSIM, what a PITA for absolutely no upside.
(they’re great for throwaway travel SIMs though)
Your carrier is the problem. I just login to my carrier’s app on the new phone and boom new esim.
So I have Xfinity and your supposed to be able to do this via web. I was riding my dual sport deep in the woods and lost my phone. Tried my damnest to activate an s21+ I had in a drawer and it kept kicking it back. I go to store and they cannot activate it as it’s “not supported by their network”. They try to sell me a new phone. I’m frustrated and on like day 3 no phone so I said fuck it I’ll buy the cheapest Motorola on the shelf, but under one condition. I refused to buy the phone or continue my contract unless they would give me a physical sim (they tried pushing the esim HARD). I got home, took the sim out of my Motorola, popped it into my “unsupported phone” and it worked fucking fine. Esims are just another complication and way to get tech illiterate into the store. As long as I can I will never let go of my physical sim ever again.
What a sane person would want to install a shitty carrier app just for that? There should be a way to do it via their web ui in the least
Well, my carrier’s app isn’t super shitty, actually. No ads, no bloat, just account management.
But… You get a new phone, you install the app and login to get your esim, then uninstall. Not exactly a difficult problem.
How do you how shitty it is or not? Have you examined their code? Do you trust them blindly to let them run arbitrary code on your device? They are preferring to shove their app into our devices for many many reasons that non of them are for our benefit.
And uninstalling right after is closing the gate after the horses are long gone
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That’s not a solution. There is no other carrier that has the coverage I need.
The problem with eSIM as a concept is that it puts too much responsibility on the carrier, and there are way too many shitty carriers out there, and with the cost of building a network and the limited amount of spectrum, mobile carriers are not a functioning free market.
That doesn’t mean that your carrier isn’t the problem.
Just like the person you replied to, I to can just log in to my carriers app on a new phone and get eSIM fixed there if my old phone is in an unusable state.
I don’t think a physical SIM is a guarantee that the phone number remains intact. The SIM is a token in the system that links a piece of hardware to a phone number and that link is maintained by the carrier. My phone spontaneously stopped being able to make calls and receive SMS. I went through the usual steps to rectify it but no dice. The carrier had to manually reconnect my number because it had become a victim of their periodic cull of disused numbers. Took quite a few calls over a period days to achieve this. ‘yes I have turned it off and on…’ ad nauseum.
All of the bad parts of esim are the fault of the carriers in my experience. I’m on a MVNO that created their own method of generating a new esim and moving the number via their website and app and it is painless for the most part.
They only let you do it 4 times a billing cycle though without talking to customer service. Which I suspect is the fault of the upstream carrier somehow.
eSIM sounds good on paper, but the implementation is horrible. You should be able to easily back them up. Also I expected to be able to have many many eSIMs rather than be limited to one or two.
Fucking duh.
Carriers fucking suck in every metric possible, you have to be insane to want to get their shitty support and shitty apps involved in anything more than the strictly necessaryI’ve actually just had my eSIM decision backfire on me.
I switched months ago and hadn’t had an issue until I got ready to go to an airport last week. I figured I’d be able to switch off the eSIM and switch on Airplane Mode so my phone could essentially be an offline iPod, but when I landed and tried turning it back on it didn’t work. I then found people discussing the same issue on their phones (GrapheneOS + Pixel 7) and really regretted messing with it.
My carrier’s account login hilariously requires an SMS 2FA to the phone number that’s been yeeted from existence and since I’ve been staying with in-laws this Christmas I’m not willing to sit on hold for however many hours to recover my account till I get home.
what’s worse: none of my trusty backup phones support eSIM. so when my eSIM phone dies, i’m pretty much fucked until i buy a new one. :/
You can buy an eSim adapter online for ~$15 off sites such as AliExpress.
Such adapters are open source, and can support up to holding and swapping between 20 eSim cards, which makes phones with physical sim cards strictly dominate those without them.
i see, TIL.
on the other hand, this doesn’t solve the hassle when my primary phone dies and I’m unable to log in to my carrier’s self care to generate the new eSIM QR code.
unless… it’s somehow possible to do that beforehand – “preload” the new eSIM in the backup phone and activate it only when the main phone dies.
you can preload them as I understand.
one of the major apps for doing that is openeuicc: https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/OpenEUICC
if you look it won’t work on unrooted phones, but it’s easyeuicc variant can still be used in the stated ways.
f-droid also has the jmp sim manager: https://f-droid.org/packages/chat.jmp.simmanager its a fork of the former, but it works 100% in unrooted phones with the jmp esim adapter that you can order in the app
cool, thanks for the info, I’ll check it out!
You can buy an eSim adapter online for ~$15 off sites such as AliExpress.
And does it share with Chinese intelligence only, or the NSA too? 😉
I love eSIM because one day on the bus I was tired of AT&T speeds being shit in my commute, so I decided to switch carriers. By the time I walked home from the bus, I was done releasing my number and setting up my new eSIM to my new carrier and immediately got faster speeds. It just worked.
I completely understand if you’re changing numbers all the time it could be annoying, but it was just a simple activation for me.
I think I’d be fine if I had to use eSIM (when I get a new phone every few years, I touch the SIM exactly once to move it to the new phone and then forget it even exists until the next phone).
I still like having a physical SIM though and haven’t converted it, even though I could. I like the idea that, if my phone dies, I can easily switch it into a new phone (even someone else’s). I don’t think I’ve ever done that, at least not since the days of dumb phones with limited/expensive plans, but I like to know I could. The only downside is that I have to enter the SIM PIN if I restart my phone.
