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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

After switching providers with a recent phone with eSIM, I would say I’d never want to go back to physical SIMs ever again.

They’re going to go away worldwide eventually, they’re just more easily removed in the US where the carriers are more bleeding edge on features and there are only 3 providers to think about in a very large homogenous market.

The difference between waiting for a SIM card to arrive in the mail or traveling to a store, fiddling with a paperclip, tray, and impossibly tiny nano-SIM versus switching providers in 10 minutes via an app is night and day.

Most SIM/dual SIM solutions also involve removing both SIM cards at once even to swap out one of two, and they tend to require device restarts.

In the past I’ve also had network problems as a result of bad/damaged SIM cards.

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You seem to forget that moving an eSIM between phones isn't nearly as straightforward as moving a physical SIM, and often must be requested or approved by the carrier. If for some reason you intend to use the same SIM in various phones for one reason or another, it's a huge inconvenience.

Technically, the same thing can happen with a physical SIM. I tried that with a Nexus 5X on Verizon and that's how I learned their network has an allowlist system.

How does the carrier even know what phone you are going to use? My last SIM was bought in store at T Mobile, for cash, and I can freely move between phones. I never buy phones from carriers. My Pixel as bought directly from Google and immediately flashed with Graphene.

IMEI maybe?

This could have also been an issue where I needed to activate on some other phone before transferring to a Nexus 5X in order for me to get it to work.

Verizon is known to be the most restrictive carrier in the US as far as allowed devices.

They do know, I experienced it myself.

I had a testing phone and my regular phone, I kept swapping the same Verizon SIM between them. It worked for maybe 3 swaps, then Verizon blocked my account and sent me an email: suspicious activity detected, the SIM is blocked and cannot be restored, the contract has been terminated, you will receive the refund in mail.

Good riddance, US Mobile is so much cheaper and pleasant to use. I am scared to swap SIMs with them now though.

ooo I can't wait for the CDMA carrier locking boogaloo all over again.

Can I switch out an eSIM while running an AOSP based ROM yet (ie no proprietary userspace)? Last time I checked (several years ago) it didn't seem to be possible. Did that change?

GrapheneOS has support for eSIM management these days but IIRC they need to invoke proprietary Google libraries for that to work.

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