Has anyone recently tried signing up for google play store anonymously? I want to report my difficulties in doing so:
I began on the owner profile by installing orbot and setting it to always on vpn. I then installed all necessary apps for play store to work including other app stores as my owner profile is strictly for downloading applications anonymously.
I then opened play store while connected to a public wifi network and created a new account using information from fakenamegen. Play store requires you in this case to verify with a phone number which I thought would be easy with an SMS code by using an SMS receiving company. I set a service up beforehand for receiving an SMS code only to find that google only gives you a prompt to verify your number from your sim/esim.
Since I did not want this, I moved to a laptop also running tor to create a play account on there. Once I got to the phone number verification step, it simply gives you a QR code to scan. I used a safe QR scanning app to verify what it links to, and it gives instructions to send a specific text with a code to a number. Not wanting to use my personal number, I went and purchased a tracfone to complete this. I went through the sign up process once again, scanned the QR code, and quickly manually entered the text code and sent the message from the new phone. I say quickly because my first attempt at doing this it said it timed out only after about a minute. Finally after all of this, I successfully created an anonymous play account on the owner profile.
One primary issue is region locked apps that I can only very rarely get to download if I mess with my end point, but it does not seem any of the USA endpoints ever work even after closing the play store and removing cache. For this case I have created another profile solely for these apps with my actual google account.