iPhone Handoff
iPhone Handoff lets you use one phone number between two devices, so you can switch between them whenever you want. It makes it easy to move back and forth between devices optimized for the moment — like weekday business or weekend adventures.
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After iPhone Handoff is set up, one iPhone becomes the main iPhone and the other iPhone becomes the secondary iPhone that shares the number. Your main iPhone should be the one you use most often. Some carrier services, like Call Forwarding and Caller ID, and carrier account management can only be managed on your main iPhone. Contact your carrier for more details.
To move between your main iPhone and secondary iPhone, simply unlock the device that you want to start using — your phone number will automatically become active on that device.
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iPhone Handoff works with Dual SIM as long as both eSIMs are from carriers that support iPhone Handoff. Once set up, both eSIMs switch together simultaneously when you unlock your iPhone.
They say you need to have Messages in iCloud enabled.
In addition to needing two iPhones running iOS 27, “iPhone Handoff” will seemingly require carrier support. The forum post mentions that T-Mobile in the U.S. and Deutsche Telekom in Germany might be among the first carriers to offer the feature.
T‑Mobile is introducing the feature at $5/month.
This seems like a ridiculous thing to charge for. It’s not adding a separate device to your plan, like adding a cellular iPad or even an Apple Watch. It’s just switching your active eSIM between two iPhones. You can do this for free, now, on any carrier via Settings → Cellular — but it takes a bunch of taps, confirmation on both iPhones, and a few minutes for the carrier to register the eSIM transfer. iPhone Handoff just eliminates all the annoying friction and waiting.
As reported by CNET, AT&T seemingly has no plans to support iPhone Handoff.
Previously:
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I wonder if carriers can use phone switching as an excuse to put sanctions on your contract/account. I’m sure they have some dumb “reasonable” clause, which they might define as “switching a device once or wince a year”.
Here's something that most US users and probably even many devs at Apple are not aware of:
For over 25 years, it's been possible to have more than one SIM card with the same phone number in Germany. o2 was the first to offer this, but others followed.
Which means: I have currently 4 phones (3 iPhones, one Android) that all have the same number. I can make calls from any of them, and if someone calls, all can ring (I can configure this thru my phone provider). Text messages won't allow this - but I can still choose and quickly switch which phone (i.e. SIM) shall get the messages. And with the "forward text messages" feature in iOS, as long as the iPhone receives the msg, it can forward it to the other iOS devs and even to my Macs.
HOWEVER: Apple in the US doesn't handle this well. The problem is that iMessage and Facetime get confused if more than one device wants to handle the msgs for a phone number. It leads to the problem that I can activate it on one iPhone, but then the others show an endless progress icon for the activation of Facetime and iMsg, and I keep getting prompted on all other devices whether I want to add the phone number (and it's not clear if it means to add it to the devive where I'm prompted at, or globally for my entire account). Sometimes I get prompted 10 times a day or more.
It's a huge pain. Apple DE support is aware of it and tries to help - and they require me to not only reset my network settings (which makes me lose all my stored Wifi pws) but also wants me to clear all my VPNs - which is a huge pain as I have several, and they're difficult to re-import (and there's no easy way to export/save them).
But usually, after a few weeks, it all works. Never know what made it work.
I can only hope that with the new changes, this will work better. But I don't count on it. So far, I have installed iOS 27 on two iPhones and still have the same trouble activating iMsg and Facetime on them for my phone number.
This kind of makes sense for the reasons @Thomas mentions in that Apple puts another layer over the phone number and so it's better if Apple handles that entire layer.
Nothing else about this makes sense beyond a few obvious reasons that seem ridiculous to me. I have yet to have anyone name a single case where this would really be useful beyond testing the iPhone Duo. Much less any reason for the network operators to charge for it other than greed. Literally greed, this should be invisible to them since Apple is handling it at their layer.
There doesn't even seem to be a security issue here, nor a billing one. It's still one device at a time, enforced at the OS layer. On the same Apple ID. All it's doing is switching activation between two devices rapidly, which have already been pre-authenticated.
I welcome someone with more technical knowledge and insight about this than me to enlighten me.
