[officeplant]

iPhone 13 user in the US here. ESIM's have been both nice and a complete pile of shit. Not a single prepaid service I've tried supports transferring ESIMs between iPhones yet. Instead of just moving a physical SIM between phones I'm stuck in a webchat line for 30-45 minutes waiting for a rep to help move the eSIM. It's especially frustrating when you juggle phones for testing purposes.

Even worse I ran into an issue lately where a carrier I thought about moving too but decided not to accidently ported my number to their service. (in store error). Which left me unable to even dial carrier services, something you can usually do with a SIM still in the phone.

On the plus side, I needed emergency phone service after my phone number was stolen, and I was able to get on public wifi and buy prepaid service with a new prepaid company and register an ESIM in minutes since it was an all new line.

ESIMs have their benefits, but between ESIMs and VoLTE whitelisting it really feels like US carriers are trying to drag us back to the shitty old days of cell service lock-in and carrier phones. None of which usually hurt people with flag ship devices, only people hunting for budget unlocked solutions they can drop any SIM card in and go.