Just curious.
I used eSim for a while when I first got a phone that supported eSim, because I wanted to make it harder for a thief to disable the phone tracking, but now my main phone is broken and I’m a bit annoyed at having to chat with customer support for half and hour to activate eSim on another device.
I use a physical sim. I’m not sure it even supports eSIM, but I’d be hesitant to ditch the physical sim for precisely the reasons you mentioned. I’ve swapped sims around between phones and even borrowed them from people when I was in a new area, something that’s much harder with eSIMs.
Physical, because “it just works”. I have had a SIM fail on me once, but I was quickly able to get a replacement. Popped out the old one and popped in the new one. No fuss.
eSIM on the other hand requires competency from both your device manufacturer and service provider, and is a mess to deal with if anything goes wrong. The phone manufacturer will blame the service provider and vice versa.
I’ve had two unpleasant experiences trying to activate an eSIM, and I don’t plan on using it again soon – at least not until every Android device manufacturer does an Apple and goes eSIM-only.
what’s eSim?
From my understanding, its a chip inside your phone that allows you to download Sim cards onto your phone. You could switch carriers without visiting a store or waiting days for the sim to arrive, just take minutes to an hour depending on which carrier you choose. Cool concept in my opinion, just not very mature at the moment.
I use a physical SIM because my phone doesn’t support an eSIM, also i’m preety sure you have to activate it everytime you clean flash a custom ROM.
I’m not an expert in technology, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t delete eSims since they are actually stored in a separate chip. I’ve done some experients with wiping data (I’m always curious about new tech so I always do some testing to satisfy my curiosity) via remote wipe, both Android and iOS, I’ve intentionally entered incorrect password to get it to reset, and I’ve used the recovery menu in android to reset it, and I’ve used android apps that lets you wipe data via the device admin feature. The eSim always persisted unless you specifically choose to delete it, so I think flashing a rom isn’t gonna be different as long as your don’t send a command to the eSim chip to wipe the eSim data.
Which can be a bit worrying if a theif is able to reset your phone and bypass the anti-theft device activation features (which is difficult, but not impossible), they could use your eSim if it doesn’t have a Sim pin to protect it, which nobody even thinks about locking the eSim since most people would assume it is safe behind the phone’s lockscreen and it would get deleted in a device reset, but the eSims never get reset unless you specifically chose to.
Physical SIM. Mostly because I’ve never tried to buy a SIM in a country where eSIMs exist yet. It’s kind of annoying, as it’s the only way I can dual-SIM my phone.
Current eSIM possibilities in given countries:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209096
