I did it for 6 years when I lived in Germany. I had a data only sim card and a google voice US phone number. Verdict: It's not doable if you want it to work 10

I did it for 6 years when I lived in Germany. I had a data only sim card and a google voice US phone number. Verdict: It's not doable if you want it to work 100%. And in the US I would say it's not doable at all because Android/dumbphone users are still using SMS instead of a messenger app like Whatsapp, so you have no way of communicating with them at all. The biggest problem for me was online services that want to verify your account via your phone number. They don't understand not having a phone number. And about 20% of the time, they block VOIP phone numbers for verification purposes, so your google voice number won't work there either. Literally no way to move forward there other than ask a friend to let you borrow their number or use your burner phone or something. You also can't sign up for Whatsapp without a phone number, but luckily it does work with google voice. Google voice also doesnt let you set it up so your device gets incoming calls unless you forward them to a real phone number. So you can only make calls with it, not receive. Maybe some other VOIP solutions are better at this. The google voice app on iOS is pretty shitty. Now that I'm back in the US, I had to get a phone number because messenger app adoption is very very low. iOS users are fine because iMessage is awesome, but for people on Android, there's just nothing. They still use SMS. Maybe you can get around this with VOIP, but I didn't want to hassle with it.