I think the GP question was how to migrate your eSIM to another phone.

You can transfer the sim but it needs to be activated on the other phone. I have even seen reactivation charges of €5.

Yes, about how to move it to another phone, especially when my current phone just died. Maybe I dropped it and now the display no longer works.

That's the problem. Now your carrier is a single point of failure, and the typical person has zero leverage over the carrier.

Leverage? This is a standard customer service process.

And when that process fails, what recourse does the average Joe have? Especially when you can't afford to have much downtime between phones.

I think you’re unnecessarily worried about this. If you don’t trust your carrier to get this process right, perhaps it’s worth choosing a different carrier.

Do you know a carrier which you have any leverage against? I don't. Better get a physical SIM.

Oh, you do? It's still a single point of failure. Customer support servers down? Should have gotten a physical SIM.

Unbeatable servers? Good luck swapping eSIMs when you want to sell/throw away your phone abroad, out of range of internet. Should have gotten a phyical one.

Never out of range? Wonder what you do when your phone breaks and you have no one to babysit you through the process. Should have gotten physical.

Etc.

That's what an additional sigle point of failure means: less control over your own infrastructure.

If this actually happens to people in real life, let’s talk about it. All indications are that this problem isn’t a serious one yet.

New technologies often improve things in some way while introducing concerns and potential drawbacks in other ways. The question is whether, on balance, the new way is worth the risk.

My experience so far is that it is — it’s very convenient to be able to use a service like Airalo to order prepaid eSIMs for data service in foreign countries in advance. It makes traveling a joy now, and my wife is irritated a whole lot less by the prepaid SIM hunt I used to go on when traveling abroad. Plus no more tools or risking losing your SIM tray (or the SIM itself) when you swap it out on an airplane tray table.

It depends on how you define "serious". If it works for 99% people with a net positive and it doesn't work at all for 1%, is it serious enough to keep the old version?

My experience says that it will get steamrolled and the 1% left hanging, looking at significantly worse solutions, or none altogether.

A 1% failure rate would be huge. That's 1 out of every 100 customers. No rational carrier would tolerate that.

I know we all hate telcos and mobile phone carriers -- and a lot of their mistrust is quite frankly deserved -- but this seems like an edge case that most customers won't even run into. First they need to switch devices, which eliminates most customers, and then second, they need to experience some kind of failure on switch. If the failure rate is any higher than before, I would be surprised. But let's wait to see the data before we all go up in arms.

My carrier is currently not doing eSIM. Also some low cost carriers can’t be contacted in any other way than a chat. Which is a problem in many real world situations if you need an eSIM asap. Sometimes there is no one in the chat available at all.

If your carrier doesn’t support eSIM, then this discussion doesn’t apply to you. Carriers aren’t going to make eSIM available until they have the support structure available to make it useful to customers.

To the sibling reply to this, how is a physical sim any worse in this regard?

I’ve heard of that but never ran into it myself. Isn’t that also the case for some carriers with physical SIMs too?

I guess eSIM is still a luxury for now so they want to milk it. I have only ever heard of first time activation of a sim. Vodafone in NL requires an activation via their app, or phone, before first use. But I think that is normal. The last time I got a physical sim it was in 2013 and I have transferred the same sim across multiple phones since.