It’s undoubtedly tied to the phone with is tied to the owner

People report that it works even on grapheneos with sandboxed google play. My guess there's some fingerprinting going on, not necessarily that they're tying the account to some account id.

I tried and it didn't work, it kept asking for my phone number.

Well yeah. But if you care about anonymity on that level there are ways around that (i.e. buying in cash and creating the account using public WiFi).

What? Buy a phone in cash and have it billed to what, your monero wallet? This isn’t possible in today’s world, in the west anyways. Phones are tied to people.

And “worried about anonymity in that way”… that’s the topic being discussed here.

You can buy a phone with physical cash from a store or used p2p…

As far as cell service goes well yeah there is no such thing as anonymity. Towers will always know your location as long as the radio is on and that can be correlated easily.

How is your phone tied to you? You bought it through GOogle store?

What??