Apple Watch on Zevvle

Zevvle Chat 🔥
#1

I’ve just got an Apple Watch as birthday present (which I’m going to collect from the Apple store this afternoon). I asked for the cellular version because well mostly monkey brain see interesting feature, money brain want interesting feature.

Anyway, what I didn’t realise is that its not just any old eSIM, the iPhone gives the watch an eSIM with some fancy OAuth with the network provider. My original plan was to get a second Zevvle SIM for my iPhone and an eSIM for the watch from someone else. Didn’t care they’d have different numbers as I can just add them to my PBX. Regardless that isn’t possible it seems.

I know Zevvle doesn’t currently support eSIMs, but when/if they do come would Apple Watch support be difficult/time consuming to add?

Mildly off topic: if anyone knows of how I could get an eSIM for the watch that is routed to SIP, that’d be useful to know.

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#2

TBC; I haven’t looked into what’s involved technically, but from the conversations I’ve had I don’t think it’s a coincidence only EE, Vodafone and O2 support the watch at the moment.

We haven’t invested in SIP yet, nor do I know if the setup will be the same for eSIMs. If it is and getting watch support isn’t out of the question, we could possibly do both… that’s a future conversation, though.

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#3

You mention getting an eSIM for the watch from someone else on another network, not caring if the number’s not the same as your Zevvle SIM. Interestingly enough, EE just launched that exact plan for Apple Watches, called the Unpaired ‘Family Member Plan’ which gives the watch a brand new number, separate from the one on the phone it’s paired to, so I’d guess that’d work with your plan for adding it to your PBX.

The only issue with that it seems is that the AW has to be paired to the iPhone connected to EE - annoying! Hopefully they’ll roll something out where the watch can have it’s own number on EE (like was just made possible now) but doesn’t have to be paired to an EE phone.

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#4

Ah yeah the family member plan won’t work for me, since if you want the watch to be properly paired to the phone, it just won’t let you select that.

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#5

Good luck with that. The problem isn’t even technical, it’s that the whole provisioning process requires Apple-specific stuff (you need a carrier profile for starters) and Apple will not talk to you even if you get all the tech sorted and get an iPhone SIM from a carrier that technically supports eSIM and offers you an API to provision those.

The only answer here is legal - not technical. We can wait for someone to be pissed off enough to cause legal trouble on competition/antitrust grounds and force Apple to reconsider this practice (the whole point of physical SIMs back in the day is that you could switch carriers easily and phones are not bound to any particular carrier, and now Apple is breaking that intentionally).

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#6

Yeah, I’ve spoken to AAISP about this since they have a SIP2SIM product. They currently operate on O2, who do offer eSIM (and support the apple watch) and they’re almost ready to offer normal eSIMs.

There’s definitely going to be some trouble getting Apple to let them use the eSIMs for the watch, not looking forward to that argument.

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#7

I’m using AAISP SIMs as well (among others) and I had no luck getting Apple carrier profiles for these (for other reasons like tweaking FaceTime over cellular and personal hotspot restrictions as well as changing the voicemail number & carrier support numbers/URLs) which is what you’d need for Apple Watch provisioning even if both the underlying carrier and AA support eSIMs.

Apple would literally not even get back to me and their developer support would give me inconsistent answers about who to contact. Another carrier (who used to provide a service similar to AA’s) managed to get profile for their SIMs but was unable to provide any details due to NDAs so I don’t even know what they did differently to be able to succeed there.

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