The question is not whether the eSIM will replace physical SIM cards. The question is when

We have been telling you for years how technology eSIM It is gaining ground little by little, so much so that today it is normal for smartphones to include these chips as a complement to physical SIM cards. It is a technology with its advantages and disadvantages, But it is increasingly clear that the idea is not that both technologies coexist, but that the eSIM ends up making physical cards disappear.

At least that is the direction in which the industry seems to be heading if we look at the steps of recent years. This makes the question no longer whether it will happen, but when will it start to happen. There are no dates or calendars set for this technological change, but there are data and projections that seem to point to the next decade.

The slow but sure adoption of the eSIM

Since their creation in 1991, SIM cards have become smaller and smaller. SIMs began to become MiniSIM, and then they became MicroSIM, and then the NanoSIM that the vast majority of mobile phones currently use.

The next evolutionary step was eSIMan internal chip of the mobile phone where the data that has always been on the SIM cards can be downloaded and installed. This opens the door for you to have on your mobile not only the data of your operator, but also that of other third-party services specialized in cheap eSIM such as Saily of NordVPN and the like.

eSIM chips were created in the last decade, and over the years they have also been miniaturized to take up less and less space. But one thing is the existence of technology and another its implementation on commercial deviceswhich has been slow.

First they began to arrive at smart watches like the Samsung Gear S2 Classic 3G of 2016, being a solution to give them connectivity without having to spend space in a physical card slot. And in 2017 the first compatible smartphones began to arrive, such as the Pixel 2 from Google (although it was only compatible with Google Fi) and since then they have been reaching more and more mobile phones.

Until recently, the eSIM has been implemented as a complementary alternative to the SIM. Almost all users continue to use the SIM, but if you went abroad and needed a data card it was easier to contract an eSIM. There were also the most curious users starting to test this technology.

Since then, the eSIM has begun to reach other devices such as home automation products, and even laptops. Some manufacturers like Apple have taken risks to promote the eSIM. First it was in 2022 with the iPhone 14which would be sold without a SIM card slot in the United States, and in 2025 launched the iPhone Aironly with eSIM in the United States, although in Spain it still has a physical slot.

But currently this remains a rarity in Europe. The eSIM in Spain It already has the support of almost all operators. Besides, There is research that points Because in 2024, 70% of new mobile phones had support for this technology, and 10 to 15% did not have a physical SIM slot, numbers that will gradually grow.

What are the benefits of the eSIM

The main benefit of the eSIM is that you no longer have to request cards when contracting a service. And if you port, you won’t have to wait for a card to be sent to you either, although this will always depend on the method the operator uses to synchronize the eSIM, since sometimes you will need to receive documentation.

Of course, you should know that activating an eSIM can take hours, or even a couple of days, until they send you the necessary keys. Furthermore, in all ports you will be asked for your identification by law, and depending on the operator you may even need to physically go to a store, something that is to avoid fraud.

You won’t need to order duplicate SIMs either. if you want to use your data or phone number on multiple devices. In addition, there will be more facilities for using more than one data or calling rate on a single mobile phone, since there is support for storing the profiles of different operators and changing them as needed.

There are also other advantages such as greater security. No one will be able to remove your SIM and steal it, because it is integrated and cannot be accessed. Besides, manufacturers save space physically inside their phones as they do not have this slot, something they can take advantage of, for example, to give their batteries more capacity.

However, eSIMs also have some disadvantages. The main thing is to change your mobile phone can be somewhat more cumbersome, since it requires an extra process to migrate the data from the digital card. If you change to another mobile phone with the same operating system it is relatively easy, but changing from Android to iPhone or vice versa can be complicated.

The eSIM will coexist quite a bit with the SIM

No, the physical SIM is not going to disappear overnight. It’s going to be quite a long process. It will probably take more than a decade.although this is something that can always change depending on how manufacturers push in that direction.

According to CCS Insight forecasts in 2025 collected by the BBCat the end of 2024 there were 1.3 billion smartphones with eSIM in use, and the figure is expected to reach 3.1 billion in 2030. Therefore, we are going to have sustained growth in mobile phones with eSIM.

But this does not mean that traditional SIMs are going to stop being used at the same rate, but rather that most mobile phones will continue to use both technologies for still several years.

We have an example in this Holafly projectiona company that sells eSIMs for travel. Collecting statistics Statista and GSMA Intelligence has made a graph where you can see that despite the fact that around 2028 mobile phones with only eSIM will begin to surpass those with only SIM those that use both technologies will continue to growalthough not at the same speed.

According to this data, and we must not forget that it is shown by an interested company, it will not be until sometime between 2037 and 2038 that the number of mobile phones with only eSIM will reach those that have an eSIM and a physical SIM.

But the growth of the eSIM will not be the same throughout the world. As we see on the map of this Mordor Intelligence studyin the next 5 years the growth in eSIM adoption will be very large in countries like China, India or Australia, very small in Iceland or Russia, and medium in the rest of the world.

This is something that we can also see in this GSMA Intelligence study where they are shown eSIM and traditional SIM connections in different regions of the world in 2025. In the graph we see that although the United States, Latin America or Europe had the number of eSIM connections and SIMs quite matched, in others such as China, India or the rest of the Asia-Pacific countries the physical SIM is still predominant.

We also cannot forget that the eSIM and SIM are not only used in smartphones, but also in other connected devices, and this data shows the total adoption and use of the technology in all sectors.

So when will the physical SIM disappear?

Physical SIM cards are not going away anytime soon. In fact, as we are seeing in these data and studies, it will be from 2030 that the eSIM begins to consolidate much more, and it may still take many years for the physical SIM to disappear.

Another different thing is how the evolution in the mobile market is.. For example, one thing is that you are still going to have a decade where the majority of smartphones use eSIM and SIM cards, but what is going to happen to high-end mobile phones is another.

High-end mobile phones are those where there is a greater technological race, and now that Apple has paved the way, it would not be surprising that there are more and more manufacturers. whose best phones use only eSIM. Perhaps this will begin to happen in the remainder of the decade, but there are no projections that guarantee the pace it will happen.

Therefore, we may start to see the physical SIM gradually disappear. Perhaps in the first high-end mobile phones in the remainder of the decade, and perhaps from 2030 it will begin to drop to other lower ranges, but there are no numbers or projections that they can tell us at the speed it will happen.

Therefore, two things are quite clear. One is that physical SIM cards will sooner or later end up disappearing due to a technological change. And the other is that they will surely still be with us for at least another decade.

eSIMs are also going to die

So far we have talked about eSIMs to differentiate the virtual version of a SIM from the physical one, and the technology offered by operators and other companies so that we can connect to their devices by installing the data instead of using a physical card.

But an important distinction must be made, and that is that possibly eSIMs also end up evolving and disappearing. In fact, there are already mobile phones on the market that use iSIMwhich are surely the final form that this technology will take.

iSIMs are the Integrated SIM within the device SoC. The SoC is the brain and heart of a mobile phone and other devices, the system of chips where the processor, GPU, NPU, modem, controllers and, sometimes, stacked RAM are located (as in Apple chips with unified memory).

Therefore, the future points to independent eSIM chips disappearing completely, and that are integrated directly into the SoC as another component of the brain of the devices.

When this happens, for a long time we will continue to talk about the term eSIM to refer to this type of connections, but the technology will actually be a little different. The same thing happens when we talk about physical SIMs, since we are currently using NanoSIMs.

This will not change digital SIM adoption projectionsit was simply to specify and distinguish the technologies with which they end up being implemented.

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