Moving an eSIM to a new phone

None of that is a defect in what you bought. It is the same property that makes an eSIM hard to steal: the profile exists inside one phone’s secure element or it does not exist, and no copy of it is sitting anywhere waiting to be moved. The practical consequence is small — a device change is a support step rather than a settings step.

• You have not wiped the old phone yet. Sixty seconds of preparation removes every problem in this guide. Skip to section 05.
• You already wiped it. Recoverable in almost every case, and free. Skip to section 08.
• Neither phone works. Your balance lives on your access token, not on a handset. Keep the token and nothing is lost.

The rest of this guide takes those three situations apart in order, starting with the question everybody actually means when they ask it: what comes across on its own?

Setup assistants are cheerfully vague here, so here is the same question asked seven ways. Read the middle column as “without you doing anything about it”.

Your own number is the easy half, and both platforms now do it over the air. Both paths depend on your carrier having switched the feature on — where it has not, the fallback is identical everywhere: ask them for a fresh QR code.

1. 01
   iPhone to iPhone, during setup

   The setup assistant offers to bring your cellular plan across. Accept it, and the transfer runs over Bluetooth while both phones are awake and beside each other.

2. 02
   iPhone to iPhone, afterwards

   Settings → Cellular → Add eSIM, then choose the option to transfer from a nearby iPhone. Confirm the code shown on the old screen; the line deactivates there as it activates here.

3. 03
   Android to Android

   Recent Pixel and Galaxy releases offer an eSIM transfer in the setup wizard, and afterwards in the SIM manager. The wording varies by brand far more than the mechanism does.

4. 04
   Either direction, if the option is missing

   That is your carrier, not your phone. A support chat and the sentence “please re-issue my eSIM for a new device” usually takes minutes.

5. 05
   Any direction, the manual way

   Install the QR your carrier sends as a brand-new eSIM, then delete the old profile once the new one has signal. Slower, works everywhere.

A carrier can re-issue your line because your line is an account with your name on it. A prepaid travel profile has no account behind it and, here, no name either — so there is nothing for a phone-to-phone transfer to authenticate against. What there is instead is a profile built cryptographically for one piece of hardware.

• It is sealed to one EID. The download was encrypted for your old phone’s secure element. Another chip cannot open it, whatever you do with the QR.
• The activation code is spent. Codes are single-use by carrier rule, so a screenshot of a QR you already scanned installs nothing at all.
• Deleting is one-way. Removing a profile does not release it back into circulation. It ends.
• No transfer handshake exists. The built-in transfer features talk to a carrier’s provisioning system, and an anonymous prepaid profile has no such conversation available to it.

For the reason the chip is this stubborn, the security guide covers the same machinery from the attacker’s side. The properties that make a device change inconvenient are precisely the ones that make a profile impossible to clone — you cannot have the second without the first.

Do these in order, on the old phone, before anything is erased or handed over. It is the difference between a device change that costs nothing and one that costs a ticket and an afternoon.

1. 01
   Copy your access token somewhere real

   The XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX code is the entire account: balance, orders, tickets. Put it in a password manager, not in a note on the phone you are about to sell.

2. 02
   Decide whether the plan is worth moving

   Open the order page and read data left and days left. A pack with 200 MB and four days on it is not worth a ticket — buy a fresh one on the new phone instead.

3. 03
   Ask for the reissue first

   If it is worth moving, request it while the old phone still works. You get the new QR before you need it, which turns the switch itself into a single scan.

4. 04
   Screenshot the manual codes

   The SM-DP+ address and activation code, saved to the device you are keeping. QR scanning fails at exactly the wrong moments; typing always works.

5. 05
   Move your number

   Built-in transfer, or the QR your carrier sent. Do this before the erase, never after.

6. 06
   Erase the old phone last

   Once the new phone shows signal on both lines, wipe the old one properly. The iOS erase flow asks whether to remove eSIMs — say yes if the device is leaving your hands.

Switching ecosystems is where every automatic path disappears at once, and it catches people out because the rest of a migration — photos, messages, apps — now has a decent tool. Cellular does not.

• There is no cross-platform eSIM transfer. Apple’s transfer talks iPhone to iPhone; the Android features talk Android to Android. Nothing bridges the two, in either direction.
• Your number still moves, just manually: ask your carrier to re-issue the line as a QR, then install it on the new phone as a fresh eSIM.
• A travel profile moves the way it always does — by reissue. A platform switch changes nothing here, because it was never a phone-to-phone operation to begin with.
• Check the handset before the migration, not after. Carrier locking and eSIM support are the two things that turn an upgrade into a return, and both take about ten seconds to verify.

Most people arrive at this page after the fact, which is fine — very little here is unrecoverable. What matters is which of these four situations you are in, because only the first move differs.

The one genuinely unrecoverable case is losing the access token itself with no copy anywhere. That is the honest price of an account with no identity attached: nobody can prove it was yours, including you, and no amount of goodwill can invent a check that was never collected. The no-KYC trade-off is real, and this is the day you meet it.

This is the part that surprises anyone expecting support to begin with proving who they are. There is nothing to prove. The order page is reached from your token, the ticket lives inside the order, and the order is a random code — that is the whole chain of custody.

1. 01
   Sign in with your token

   Paste the code. No email, no password reset and no security questions, because none of those ever existed to begin with.

2. 02
   Open the order for that eSIM

   It carries status, data used, days left and the original activation codes.

3. 03
   Start a ticket and say what happened

   “New phone, old profile gone” is enough detail. There is no form to fill in and no proof of purchase to attach — the ticket is already attached to the order.

4. 04
   Scan the new QR

   A fresh profile for the new chip, with your remaining data and validity carried over. Install it exactly as you installed the first one.

If the new profile installs but nothing connects afterwards, that is a different problem with a different fix. The troubleshooting guide walks the usual suspects in the order they actually occur, and data routing sits at the top of that list after any device change.

Here is where most of the surprise lives. Both platforms back up very nearly everything about a phone, and neither backs up the one thing this guide is about.

The reason is structural rather than an oversight. A profile is sealed to one secure element, so restoring a copy onto different hardware would produce something the new chip could not open even if the backup contained it. Not restorable is simply the shadow cast by sealed to the device.

A handful of practical limits surface whenever profiles start moving around. None are dramatic, and all are easier to know before the upgrade than during it.

Beyond that, a device change is genuinely uneventful. Your number, calls and messaging apps follow the line they always followed, the data follows the profile, and the only thing that follows you personally is a sixteen-character code you should already have copied.