I don’t understand how this wasn’t more of a priority to begin with. If you’re going to offer a digital solution for something it should at least be as convenient as the existing physical solution.
I mean, you can just not use it. It was a great option for me because I can just have one provider in the SIM slot (if I wanted) and keep my main one on the eSIM. It allowed me to swap to eSIM when my SIM card was acting up. I switched to eSIM over a year ago and honestly forgot I did and it’s been really stable. I think it’s a great option and works for me. I wasn’t even thinking of needing to switch to another phone because I have no interest in swapping to another phone. I’ve had mine since 2020 and will keep using it until it is unfixable. But I also don’t drop my phone or damage it otherwise.
This is just an assumption, but I thought the whole point was to make it more difficult for people to switch carriers?
Also because it’s locking another aspect of the device behind software that you do not have control over, which gives carriers and phone manufacturers some new levers to exact control over how and what you do.
Because evidently we haven’t learned our lesson yet.
Like when the SD card slots got taken away, and now not only are most phones storage non-expandable, you can’t even use a proper file explorer on Android anymore.
Hah. To swap eSIM on O2 in the UK, you have to order a physical pack that gets posted to you with the QR code in. There is no way to get the code to appear on a screen you can scan with your camera, or in an app on the phone you can transfer to the phone’s eSIM manager. It’s so dumb.
That’s so dumb. When I moved over to Google Fi, I put the sim in, the phone ported the number, then I chucked the sim into the fucking trash. Whenever I get a new phone, I just need to sign in on wifi and Google does the rest.
Granted – I only use phones designed to work on Fi [Nexus/Pixels], but I prefer vanilla Android.
Also I have a data only sim if I need it for anything. Right now I’m waiting on my Clockwork Pi to finally ship.
