Many people have had the same phone number for years—even decades at this point. These numbers aren’t just a way for people to get in touch because, stupidly, we have also settled on phone numbers as a means of authentication. Banks, messaging apps, crypto exchanges, this very website’s publishing platform, and even the carriers managing your number rely on SMS multifactor codes. And those codes aren’t even very secure.
So losing access to your phone number doesn’t just lock you out of your phone. Key parts of your digital life can also become inaccessible, and that could happen more often now due to the fungible nature of eSIMs.
Most people won’t need to move their phone number very often, but the risk that your eSIM goes up in smoke when you do is very real. Compare that to a physical SIM card, which will virtually never fail unless you damage the card. Swapping that tiny bit of plastic takes a few seconds, and it never requires you to sit on hold with your carrier’s support agents or drive to a store. In short, a physical SIM is essentially foolproof, and eSIM is not.
Obviously, the solution is not to remove multifactor authentication—your phone number is, unfortunately, too important to be unguarded. However, carriers’ use of SMS to control account access is self-defeating and virtually guarantees people are going to have bad experiences in the era of eSIM. Enshittification has truly come for SIM cards.
If this future is inevitable, there ought to be a better way to confirm account ownership when your eSIM glitches. It doesn’t matter what that is as long as SMS isn’t the default. Google actually gets this right with Fi. You can download an eSIM at any time via the Fi app, and it’s secured with the same settings as your Google account. That’s really as good as it gets for consumer security. Between Google Authenticator, passkeys, and push notifications, it’s pretty hard to get locked out of Google, even if you take advantage of advanced security features.
We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card. Is all this worthwhile to boost battery capacity by 8 percent? That’s a tough sell.
Curated by Aisha Patel
