My eSIM disaster: Upgrading to an iPhone 15 or Pixel 8 can be a mess
There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when Apple announced its launch iPhone 14 eSIM was only in the last year. The presentation by Apple made it sound so convenient that everything will happen digitally and you don’t have to worry about the physical SIM or card tools anymore, it just works! But in the words of Dr. Seuss, “Except when they don’t. Because sometimes they won’t.
In this case, the places to go are your carrier’s store or wait for customer service and see if they can help you over the phone (assuming you have another working phone). Now, if something goes wrong with the physical SIM card, that’s a trip to the carrier store too, but in nearly 15 years of owning phones that use SIM cards, I haven’t come across that yet. The crux of the eSIM problem lies in the activation and if anything goes wrong with the back end of your account.
We’ve seen a lot of the former after the release of the iPhone 14, so I wanted to look at one example there as a new wave of eSIM-only phones such as iPhone 15 And maybe Google Pixel 8 It’s coming soon, and I’m not convinced carriers have gotten much better at this. And the last is the issue I ran into where my daughter’s phone needed to switch to an eSIM and ended up ruining both my phone and hers in the process, and I’ll touch on that exciting experience last.
eSIM sanitizer
We passed you How to set up eSIM on iPhone 14 Before the launch last year, although it’s not as simple as “remove the SIM card from your old phone and put it in your new phone”, it only took six steps and of course there was no need to search for a SIM tool. necessary.
Now this process went without a hitch for some people, and I had no problems activating the eSIM in my phone iPhone 14 Pro which I was reviewing at the time. However, for those whom the eSIM gods failed to smile at, it was an entirely different and incredibly frustrating experience.
Kevin Ninja Tech He recounted his experience on his YouTube channel, and it mirrored that of many others. He was switching from iPhone 13 to an iPhone 14 on Visible (the MVNO that works on Verizon’s network) and everything was going as planned until it got to the activation stage. She indicated that he must wait for up to five minutes for the new phone to be activated, but he kept waiting and that never happened. He reset both the old and new phone and was greeted again by the activation screen that stuck endlessly. The cherry on top was that no phone was now connected to his account, so Kevin was completely isolated and at the mercy of calling Visible support online who was unsurprisingly buried in other victims of eSIM activation.
Now some of this can be attributed to carriers being unprepared and not well versed in the eSIM, but a year later that doesn’t seem to have changed much as I’ll cover my own story of woe.
a surprise! Your phone is not working
Like I said, the activation worked fine for me, and the problem I had with my eSIM was due to a problem with my daughter’s iPhone 13 Pro. She was constantly getting SOS on iPhone And even though we temporarily fixed it each time, it kept coming back. My conclusion was that the SIM card or SIM slot was faulty, so we went to a T-Mobile store. I reported the problem to them and instead of trying another SIM, we decided to go straight to an eSIM as that would eliminate most of the possibilities if it was still having issues after the switch. (On a positive note, you haven’t seen SOS on the iPhone once now since the switch, so this was the right choice.)
So the T-Mobile employee made the switch, which took about 10-15 minutes, and then we were on our way with her phone working again. It wasn’t until we were about halfway home that I looked at the text message she had just received that I realized it was meant for me. They inadvertently switched my line to her phone and deactivated my eSIM in the process. Now this is purely human error and not the eSIM’s fault, but it is an issue that cannot happen with the SIM card.
I had to come home to a meeting and finish my work day completely away from my phone, but then I was back at the T-Mobile store with my daughter’s iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro. The employee was incredibly helpful, but he was completely unaware of this particular situation, so he had to call his manager several times for help. After about 45 minutes, he had the appropriate eSIM on both phones, which might seem like the end of the story, but neither phone would actually connect to the network.
As it turned out, T-Mobile did not have the capacity to remedy eSIM issues that amounted to this extent, and had to contact their customer service. This next step took almost an hour as he got disconnected from customer service several times and anything mysteriously magical that launches or sets eSIMs must have taken several minutes to try. In the end, all the demons were cast out of the phones and we both got back on our own line and it only cost me my patience and three hours of my limited time on this earth between driving and waiting.
prospects
Was this a complete disaster that ruined my day, week, month, or even my year? No, not really. It was annoying because I’m always limited in time, but I was near my house and not stranded or anything like that, but it does highlight potential problems. What if I’m traveling and I try to swap my eSIM only to be left completely cut off? What if I rely on my phone as my car’s digital key?
As someone who audits phones for a living, this affects me more than anyone else, but even for those who might encounter this once every few years, it’s an element of chaos completely out of your control, and something I absolutely don’t want with my technology. I don’t think continuing to include a SIM slot in our phones was actually a design issue for manufacturers, it simply feels like a game for more control over our devices, an issue for which the industry was not well prepared. I have no doubt that the eSIM will be more reliable and stable over time, but for now, be a little cautious about when and how you start making this trade-off, as carriers are still learning the rules and manufacturers are pulling back on the security network.
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