The official documentation for GrapheneOS states that using the GPS is the most secure way of getting apps from the Play Store. Seeing as Aurora Store has not been updated in a long time and suffers from outages sometimes (probably due to rate limits), I was wondering what the exact implications are in terms of privacy if I were to log in to a Google account in order to get my apps and app updates through GPS directly.
I already use Google Play Services on my GrapheneOS device, but without having logged in. My questions are:
- what exactly would logging in to a Google account do in terms of privacy (also in regards to apps that make use of Google Play Services). Would these all be somehow "linked" to the Google account I log in to in order to download apps through the Play Store?
- is there a way to create a new Google account without providing one's real phone number?