what’s worse: none of my trusty backup phones support eSIM. so when my eSIM phone dies, i’m pretty much fucked until i buy a new one. :/

You can buy an eSim adapter online for ~$15 off sites such as AliExpress.

Such adapters are open source, and can support up to holding and swapping between 20 eSim cards, which makes phones with physical sim cards strictly dominate those without them.

i see, TIL.

on the other hand, this doesn’t solve the hassle when my primary phone dies and I’m unable to log in to my carrier’s self care to generate the new eSIM QR code.

unless… it’s somehow possible to do that beforehand – “preload” the new eSIM in the backup phone and activate it only when the main phone dies.

you can preload them as I understand.

one of the major apps for doing that is openeuicc: gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/OpenEUICC

if you look it won’t work on unrooted phones, but it’s easyeuicc variant can still be used in the stated ways.

f-droid also has the jmp sim manager: f-droid.org/packages/chat.jmp.simmanager its a fork of the former, but it works 100% in unrooted phones with the jmp esim adapter that you can order in the app