eSIM on PinePhone

[just_a_q]

Hey all,

Are multiple eSIMs support on the Pine Phone?

Thanks.

[wibble]

There is no eSIM on the PinePhone.

[EuvzO8]

anyone tried or asked about PinePhone support with https://esim.me/

[bam]

I would clarify if the modem supports eSIM first

[Kevin Kofler]

eSIM.me is an Android application and as such will not work on the PinePhone. (I strongly doubt that it can be made to work in a virtualized environment such as Waydroid. It probably will not even work under native GloDroid because the app also needs to support the specific hardware.)

You will need a physical SIM card. (And keep in mind that the PinePhone can only accept one SIM card at a time. Using multiple ones requires opening up the phone to physically swap the card.)

[Kevin Kofler]

An update on this topic:

There is now an eSIM manager for mobile GNU/Linux: https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/eu.lucaweiss.lpa_gtk/

Since the PinePhone does not have eSIM support built in, using this on the PinePhone requires a physical "eSIM card", i.e., a physical SIM card which accepts eSIM downloads. The ones from eSIM.me are such, but do note that the eSIM.me terms of service prohibit using their cards with anything other than their proprietary Android application. So use at your own risk. There are other providers, such as 5ber or sysmocom, who may have friendlier terms of service. Though of course none will officially support third-party applications. At best they will not try to actively ban them through licensing and/or technical measures.

Once you have that, you should be able to get the app to work on your PinePhone by setting some environment variables: https://fosstodon.org/@z3ntu/112673191458149259

Be warned that I have not tested any of this and that so far I am not aware of anybody having tested it yet.

[zetabeta]

i sort of like physical sims. nano-sim seems to be good size at the moment.

however, esim inside of physical sim might to be good idea. i probably need to think about it this in the future. i noticed that some operators charge for every activation of esim. which i think it is not a good idea, unless user excessively activates it.

[EuvzO8]

i sort of like physical sims. nano-sim seems to be good size at the moment.

however, esim inside of physical sim might to be good idea. i probably need to think about it this in the future. i noticed that some operators charge for every activation of esim. which i think it is not a good idea, unless user excessively activates it.

https://fosstodon.org/@linmob/112673250227986590
https://codeberg.org/lucaweiss/lpa-gtk

It looks promising. Has anyone actually tried lpac, lpa+gtk on the PinePhone?

[zetabeta]

i sort of like physical sims. nano-sim seems to be good size at the moment.

however, esim inside of physical sim might to be good idea. i probably need to think about it this in the future. i noticed that some operators charge for every activation of esim. which i think it is not a good idea, unless user excessively activates it.

https://fosstodon.org/@linmob/112673250227986590
https://codeberg.org/lucaweiss/lpa-gtk

It looks promising. Has anyone actually tried lpac, lpa+gtk on the PinePhone?

i shall test on some timetable, and i report back. however, i don't have e-sim on from any operator.

[zetabeta]

i don't pretend to know everything, only some.

short version is: pinephone does not have esim storage, both pp regular and pp pro.

i ended up to this website https://github.com/estkme-group/lpac . and i used this command line tool in debug mode, debug was limited, but it manage to communicate with eg25 modem chip. eg25 has esim support but no internal esim chip, and also no esim chip on pinephone mainboard.

esim might be possible inside physical sim card. but i don't have one to test. theoretically it should work.

i didn't get graphical program to work well.