eSIMs are ok

You could move SIM cards easily. You can move eSIMs almost as easily.

I ended 2025 by allaying a concern I’ve had as long as eSIMs have been around: eSIMs, it turns out, are reasonably easy to transfer to a new phone, even if you’re traveling.

Connect two phones to WiFi, open the new phone’s cellular settings, opt to add an eSIM, and choose to transfer an eSim from the nearby phone. iOS to iOS, that should involve only tapping a few on-screen confirmations; between iOS and Android, that may also involve scanning a QR code.

For a breathless moment, your older phone will lose cellular connection as its eSIM is deactivated (the eSIM can only be live and activated on a single phone at a time) and the newer phone will still not show connectivity as its eSIM is activating. Another moment, though, and your number will be safely transferred.

I’ve, for the past few years, had my primary number on a physical SIM, alongside a secondary eSIM for travel. And I’d always had this nagging concern about what’d happen if I upgraded phones. Would the travel eSIM carry over, even if I was outside of its region and could only make WiFi calls on that number?

I’m happy to report that transfer worked, for me. Your mileage may vary; Googling eSIM transfers reveals everything from people who routinely move eSIMs between daily and weekend devices (people who, clearly, worry far less than I do about something going wrong), and others who had to visit their carrier and go through a whole process. I maintain a mild, nagging question over how much control carriers have over your eSIM; it does seem that some carriers’ eSIMs move as they should, while others keep things more locked down.

But it is good to know that standard eSIM transfer was as easy as it could be. The loss of physicality isn’t the end of the world.

It’s not like SIM cards had any special place and purpose to most people. They’ve long been simultaneously one of the more hidden aspects of smartphones and one of their most important bits, the whole thing that makes them a phone instead of merely a pocket-sized computer. If you bought your phone through your carrier, have a monthly plan, and pay for roaming when traveling, odds are you haven’t thought about SIM cards in a while, if ever.

But in many places, SIM cards were as important a part of your mobile experience as charging cables and powerbanks. You might swap pre-paid SIMs to switch to a better deal, have a handful of local SIMs to use when traveling, or a work and personal SIM to maintain two personas on a single device. And, at the very least, if you dropped your phone down the stairs, or found that it’d died in its sleep one day, you might lose the data on your phone if you hadn’t backed up, but at least you could pop the SIM card out and revive your phone number moments later, anywhere in the world, without a trip to your carrier.

They’re weren’t perfect. You could lose your SIM card, and over time there was a chance you’d need a new physical card. Nothing lasts forever. Yet at least it felt like you had physical control over your phone number, your identity, that you could maintain multiple numbers and move around the world at will.

Along came eSIM, and that predictable portability was suddenly in question.

eSIMs are, in a way, to SIM cards what Apple Pay-style payment cards are to credit cards (which copies physical card data onto a chip in your phone, then uses it for payments via NFC the same way tap-to-pay works on a credit card). They’re a software copy of the same data that’d otherwise reside in a SIM card, stored in an eSIM-specific chip on your phone. And in many ways, that’s a better, more flexible system, as are most software replacements of hardware counterparts (think software alarm clocks with multiple alarms versus an alarm clock with its single timer). You can have multiple SIM cards, turning them on and off and will. You can add a new SIM card from an app or from a QR code, sprouting a new industry of travel-focused eSIMs.

And you can transfer eSIMs to a new phone—but here’s where the details get fuzzy.

For eSIMs aren’t software that you can move and backup at will. They’re not included in your iPhone’s iCloud backup. You can’t connect a phone to a computer, copy the eSIM data, and directly move it to another device. None of the data recovery tricks you know apply here. You can, however, transfer eSIMs directly between phones, trusting the software process with nothing you can control for a plan b if something breaks along the way.

It’d be reassuring if there was more certainty to it. If, as with two-factor codes, you could create a backup, perhaps a QR code with a pin number known only to you, that you could keep in your sock drawer as a way to restore your eSIM if your phone suddenly died. If you could tie your eSIM to some other account like your Apple ID, where your entire identity is in a digital blob that could be moved between hardware at will (we’re almost there, and then along comes eSIM with a non-backed-up bit of your phone’s data). Yet as with an increasing number of points in our digital lives, eSIMs live at this nebulous spot where you have less control than those of us who grew up with PCs need for comfort.

At least, for now, it’s reassuring for me to have gone through the process. You can move your eSIM, on your own, even if overseas away from your carrier. If you need to replace your phone on vacation or upgrade on a whim, it should be fine. eSIMs are ok.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.