You might notice the date on that page being 2021/04/06 -- I had this in draft state for a long time, but newly put it online now. What has worked back then may not work anymore, though.
> My experience has been that some services apparently let you sign up without a phone number, but then try to extort it out of you either at first login (or worse) after you've used the service for awhile.
Yes, that is basically what Google did to me, too. It was not a new account either -- from 2012 (I still have the initial "registration" e-mail).
I just checked: I can still login into that account that I had created around 2021 when I discovered the "trick" as described on the website. It asked for username/password/2FA and that was it. I did not use it much in the meantime, though.
Here we go: https://masysma.net/37/google_how_to_create_an_account_witho...
You might notice the date on that page being 2021/04/06 -- I had this in draft state for a long time, but newly put it online now. What has worked back then may not work anymore, though.
> My experience has been that some services apparently let you sign up without a phone number, but then try to extort it out of you either at first login (or worse) after you've used the service for awhile.
Yes, that is basically what Google did to me, too. It was not a new account either -- from 2012 (I still have the initial "registration" e-mail).
I just checked: I can still login into that account that I had created around 2021 when I discovered the "trick" as described on the website. It asked for username/password/2FA and that was it. I did not use it much in the meantime, though.