[biztos]

Using Airalo plus a Verizon physical sim in Europe with an iPhone SE 2 worked, and I found the cost fair enough, but it drained my battery like mad, so bad in fact that I found myself turning the eSIM off a lot. I think this is probably just Yet More Shoddy Apple Software, and I will probably use eSIM in future, but it’s something to watch out for.

[rootusrootus]

I can't imagine how SIM vs eSIM would make any difference, I would ascribe battery drain to something else tangentially related, like using a mobile network with weak coverage that has the phone constantly ramping up power to find a decent signal.

Anecdotally, I've used three eSIMs in my iPhone 15 (only two are allowed to be active at the same time, though), and my wife has a physical SIM and an eSIM on her older iPhone, and we've not experienced any weird behavior.

[biztos]

I did a fair bit of googling on this as it was my first time using eSIM. Apparently for iPhone the network switching eats the battery, whereas for Android (which has had dual-sim support for ages) it’s not a problem.

Nothing else changed in my usage, and eSIM only worked fine, it was just when the physical sim and the eSIM were both active that the battery drained super fast (like more than double the usual rate).

YMMhaveV of course.