Considering the Samsung and iPhone are wildly different platforms I doubt it's a "Linux" thing. I would suggest researching what kind of programs it is (there is SIM standard, but didn't know any operator was using this for network management).

I'll check with one of our SIM experts to see if he knows of anything like this. Maybe we "just" (please note the quotes) need to implement a small standard. Or it might mean we need to completely overhaul the smartcard component. Either way, these are parts of the phone which are locked down (do we have the sources for the SIM access?), and thus likely to be hard to implement.