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AT&T now supports eSIM on Apple’s latest iPhones

AT&T now supports eSIM on Apple’s latest iPhones

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Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

AT&T is the first major US carrier to add support for eSIM on the iPhone XS and XR, allowing its network to be used in a dual-SIM setup.

One of the XS and XR’s headline features was support for dual SIM cards, allowing the phones to be connected to two networks at once. But at the phones’ launch, the feature didn’t really work: major US carriers had issues supporting dual-SIM users, and none of them supported the eSIM feature that actually allowed the carrier to be on the additional SIM card.

eSIM support is still very limited among phones and carriers

Now, that’s changing. As part of yesterday’s iOS update, Apple added eSIM support for additional carriers, and AT&T appears to be one of them. 9to5Mac spotted that AT&T has published a help page with a note that dual-SIM support is available on the XS and XR after installing the latest update.

So the good news is, if you have an iPhone XS or XR, you should now be able to use AT&T as either your primary or secondary SIM without any issue.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to mean that AT&T is widely supporting eSIM. Other devices with an eSIM, like the Pixel 2 and 3, are still stuck with very limited carrier support. But hopefully this means carriers are warming up to the technology, which could ultimately make it much easier to switch service providers.

Verizon is also supposed to add eSIM support this month.