I bought a new iPhone SE last fall and my physical sim from my old phone was fighting with an eSIM that I must have downloaded from my carrier so I had no phone service. I went to my service provider to find out what was wrong and they reinstalled the eSIM and told me to wait 24 hours for it to become active. 24 hours later there was no change. I ended up removing my SIM card and I now had a phone that worked. That got me interested in eSIMs since I saw ads about using them in other countries. I had a trip to Australia and New Zealand coming up but still wasn’t sure they would work. None of my traveling friends used them.After being in Australia for 5 days living on public WiFi and trying to do Geocaching Adventure Labs I decided $14 wasn’t too much to lose so when I got to New Zealand I signed up and downloaded my first eSIM. It installed right away and after turning a few things on or off I was ready to go. When we got back to Australia for a few days I bought the Australian eSIM which I should have done right away. I was traveling with 4 other people and became the go between since I was the only one connected. I told them next time we take a trip we will all have an eSIm. I have a trip to Switzerland coming up and my husband will be getting a new iPhone so he can have an eSIM too and be connected.

As an early adopter and huge advocate of Airalo, I thought it was finally time to share my thoughts. Compared to when the app first came out, it is much less buggy and works more seamlessly. I would say in 2023, 5/7 times data works and 3/7 times data works flawlessly or well. The customer service team used to be amazing and tight knit a year ago, now it’s very slow and difficult to receive help. They return to you a week or more later with an attitude when you no longer need their help and just want a refund because your E-sim completely would not work (most people only vacation for that long or at least need help within that period. I’m not going to wait a over week to access my 1-3 gb of data). Obviously, this process is something that has limitations based on your phone and isn’t an easy feat to start with but I definitely don’t rely only on Airalo anymore, T-Mobile or Google Fi provide strong alternatives. The prices can be a bit steep compared to local plans when you look at buying more than 5 gb of data but it offers convenience. They have a lot of options for countries but would love to see more options per country. This app at the time revolutionized things, now it’s just an average offering on the marketplace. Definitely disappointed in how things have been trending recently. Still use this app when in a pinch but it often doesn’t work as I expect and I hope it turns around soon. Keep in mind it does not work if you have a network locked phone.

Update: Airalo has gotten back to me with some suggested items such as a global SIM which can be used. I’ll try them out. I’ve used this on two trips so far, one to Germany and another to Japan (I live in the US). iPhone 14 pro max has no sim slot so I’m stuck using eSIMs. The good is that you will get data connectivity. I had no problems activating the eSIM and using them. Everything worked ok and even my US provider worked via cellular data. Pricing is ok. Not great but ok. But this app has an appeal to those who want an easy on-ramp to getting connected to many countries. Now the quirks. In Tokyo Japan it connected only at 4G. Not even LTE, but 4G, as in 3G that is labeled as 4G. This was with SoftBank. That’s fine for google maps and other stuff but it’s not very fast. The other eSIM app I used, Ubigi connected via 5G and was pretty fast. You don’t get a native in country sim in some cases. This mostly won’t matter but it could mess with geofencing and geolocation via IP. For example in Japan my eSIM was from Singtel and as such some apps thought I was in Singapore. In Germany it used a SIM from Play (Poland) and some apps thought I was in Poland. The final quirk is that for each country you need to install the eSIM. Some apps like Ubigi just let you install one eSIM and just add in data packs. This one you need to install a SIM for each country. If you travel a lot you could end up with a lot of eSIMs.

Very happy I found out about Airalo on a Paris Facebook page. Would have spent $10/day with my internet plan! I suggested it to my daughter who travelled to England and Scotland for 10 days. Her boyfriend installed it for her no problems. When it was my turn to install it on my phone, I wasn’t quite so fortunate. I thought I’d botched it and couldn’t tell if it had actually installed. I spent the better part of the day via emails going back and forth with customer service. I’d give them five stars for the app if that experience had been better. In the end I finally got someone who directed me to see that it actually was on my phone. The next day I installed it easily on my husbands phone. When we landed in Paris, turned our phones on following the instructions I’d received and got us both connected with no glitches. Have been using it for four days now. Funny thing is I can only text other iPhone users but can WhatsApp anyone else I want to connect to. Another thing though is that I can’t send email, but can receive it. I’m not sure this has anything to do with Airola as it seems to be a problem with my outgoing Charter email service. I just haven’t had the time to deal with it and sending email on this trip doesn’t really matter.