Not sure how helpful this is, but I know that Verizon requires some kind of special sauce that the other GSM carriers do not. I got a Verizon SIM recently and

Not sure how helpful this is, but I know that Verizon requires some kind of special sauce that the other GSM carriers do not. I got a Verizon SIM recently and it would not work in my iPhone 8, which I bought in Germany. Fortunately the salesperson thought to ask if it was a foreign phone! Turns out Apple only sells the Verizon-compatible phones in the US, but doesn't exactly broadcast that fact elsewhere. The Android (or Linux) situation is probably different in the details, but not in principle.