Background:

I am currently daily driving an iPhone 14 Pro Max that I primarily use on Mint Mobile in the United States. When I received this phone, the process of transferring my SIM from my 13 Pro to an eSIM was relatively easy.

I downloaded the Mint app from the App Store, logged into my account, and followed the prompts in the settings menu of the app to download and configure my eSIM.

Once I downloaded the eSIM, my physical SIM in my 13 Pro automatically deregistered and I was all done. Everything from SMS to data worked perfectly.

My Situation in India:

Recently, I left the United States to fly to India to visit family. Historically, the process of landing here and getting a SIM card has been stressful, albeit, straightforward. Here, government regulations make getting a prepaid SIM card quite difficult, but once you get the SIM, it’s pretty easy to keep active and it works relatively seamlessly (I just tend to lose the SIM card whenever I return to the states so I have always opted to getting a new one).

This time, however, I knew I would have trouble.

The first thing I did the day after landing was drive to the Airtel store (big carrier here in India). Airtel has exceptional coverage, good data speeds (5G!), and great prices. Furthermore, their customer support is second to none compared to their largest competitor, Jio, and they just tend to work better in the more rural areas I tend to travel to.

Upon walking in the store, I completed all the required government paperwork, took the mandatory photos, and signed off all the documents (all of this is required to prevent terrorism, financial fraud, etc.), I was ready to activate my SIM.

I handed over my iPhone 14 Pro Max to the individual taking care of me, and he immediately groaned. After a short dialogue he had with his co-worker, they both turned to me and stated I was going to need to use another phone to activate the SIM and manually undergo the eSIM activation for me to be able to use my preferred phone (my iPhone 14 PM).

With no other options available to me, I reluctantly activated my new SIM in my Pixel 7 Pro, and left the store. On the drive home, I attempted to perform the eSIM activation steps which I presumed would take no time at all.

Oh how wrong I was.

Let’s take a step back:

In India, due to the high number of financial frauds, reliance on OTPs (one time pins via SMS), and general high level of cybercrime, anything involving phone numbers, SIM cards, or porting in/out requires multiple layers of security.

This situation called for those layers.

For starters, having to go into the store to activate the SIM, bring personal documents such as my Aadhaar card (sorta similar to a social security card), and then take a variety of photos is just down right annoying.

moving on!

To initiate an eSIM transfer on Airtel, one needs to text the following to 121.

eSIM <email address>

After doing this, you’re supposed to receive a secondary phone call that confirms you are attempting to convert your physical SIM to an eSIM.

After that, you are supposed to then receive a QR code that allows you to add the eSIM to your device.

As you can probably guess, none of this happened to me.

pain.

When I sent the SMS to 121, I was told my email needed to be updated and verified before I could initiate an eSIM conversion. Not a big deal I thought to myself, I will just download the Airtel app and manually update the email.

Unfortunately, Airtel doesn’t allow prepaid users to update their email from the app, or via the EMAILUPDATE text to 121.

So my only options were to A) call 121 and sit on hold until a customer support representative could help me or B) DM Airtel support on Twitter.

I chose B

Twitter support was excellent. They were able to verify my info (address, birth date, etc.), and start the process to change my email.

Here’s the kicker. This process takes 24 hours.

That meant for 24 hours, if I didn’t have another phone with me, I would be without a phone and reliant on my SIM being in someone else’s phone (likely a family member, but regardless, that’s ludicrous) in another country.

24 hours later, I received an SMS asking me to confirm the email process, to which I confirmed that yes, I did indeed want to update my email.

12 hours later, I finally got the confirmation my email was up to date. Then, I was finally allowed to send the eSIM text and follow the steps I outlined above.

Fortunately, this process worked relatively seamlessly. Everything seemed to work properly and I ran into little to no issues until the eSIM installed and I received an SMS on my Pixel.

Yeah, I received an SMS on my phone with my physical SIM I was trying to deactivate. You read that correctly.

The SMS stated it would then take 2 hours for my physical SIM to deactivate, and that all incoming and outgoing SMS would be barred for 24 hours for security reasons.

3 days later, I am writing this post from my iPhone 14 Pro Max on Airtel using their eSIM. I just got SMS service reinstated, and everything is working, including 5G and WiFi calling.

now get this plot twist:

I had to do this process three times. One for my phone, and then twice for my parents.

Conclusion:

Apple simply shouldn’t have removed the physical SIM tray. The world isn’t ready for eSIM, and I simply refuse to blame Airtel.

While I believe Airtel’s situation could be handled by the government loosening their regulations, I can see it may be necessary for these safeguards to be in place, and their customer support was nothing but sympathetic, and even went as far as they could to expedite the process on my parents devices.

Thanks for reading! I didn’t think this would go so long, but /r/ApolloApp ’s post editor and the haptics on iOS 16’s keyboard are addictive and make writing beautiful reddit posts surprisingly fun!

TL:DR it took me three days in a different country to get my iphone 14 pro max to work on a local carrier via eSIM when it took me only 12 hours to get my pixel to work properly with a physical SIM