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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

I'd really like to have a smaller phone but the lack of a second sim in iphone is a deal breaker. I don't know how iphone users do when they travel to foreign countries. One particular use case that I have is: get 4g from my foreign sim, and get authentication codes from my bank from my home sim to validate some purchase.

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> I don't know how iphone users do when they travel to foreign countries

The snarky answer is "Americans and Japanese don't leave their country and Europeans have essentially free roaming in Europe."

But I can buy roaming packages for almost every country in the world from my provider. That's what I do now instead of getting a SIM from the country I travel to. I used to do that but it was too much of a hassle for the handful of weeks per year I might be abroad.

Another option is to use one of your old phones with a local SIM.

This is completely the right answer. Another factor to consider is that while there used to be a time when a tourist or business traveler might have needed to place (or receive) a POTS call for a local hotel or restaurant it is now possible to replace most of these interactions with web pages you can hit from your mobile device or messaging systems like WhatsApp or WeChat.

> I can buy roaming packages for almost every country in the world from my provider.

At least for me (european), roaming packages are much more expensive than local sims. Nowadays, I just get a $10 to $50 sim at the airport right after exiting the plane, and that covers all my need for a few weeks. A few years ago, I thought dual sim was a gadget, but I couldn't do without now .

The higher-end models do support eSIM though and a lot of carriers seem to be adding support for this. It’s not quite as convenient as being able to swap out two physical SIMs but for traveling it could work to have your primary ‘home’ SIM as an eSIM that’s always there and the travel SIM as a physical one.

> The higher-end models do support eSIM though and a lot of carriers seem to be adding support for this.

Apple's website has a list of carriers that support eSIM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209096

From what I'm seeing, it's mostly the primary carriers and "travel data" providers that are adding support for eSIM. If someone is on a MVNO for daily use (I am), they might be out of luck.

It's even worse if you use iMessage. If you take out your usual SIM card to replace it with a foreign one, people can't iMessage you anymore, unless they use your Apple ID (email address) for it. Other apps like WhatsApp have an option to keep using the previous number even in the absence of the SIM card.

This shouldn't happen unless you intentionally switch your account over, which might happen due to Apple's persistent nagging with the red bubbles on iCloud and iMessage settings suggesting you to.

It seems to be new behavior introduced in iOS 12. I’ve observed this too, when doing a brief SIM swap. All it took was removing the SIM, and the phone automatically de-registered that number from iMessage.

My $50/month T-mobile plan comes with free unlimited international data in most of the world, so I just don't bother with getting a local plan while traveling any more.

I see. Here in Europe, my monthly plan is much cheaper (about 10 euros a month), but international plans are more expensive, so it makes sense to get a cheap local sim when traveling outside Europe.

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