My Google accounts were created earlier, so I guess that "feature" has been added later. And yes, it's crazy. At least I'm not forced to add a phone after the

My Google accounts were created earlier, so I guess that "feature" has been added later. And yes, it's crazy. At least I'm not forced to add a phone after the fact. My parents didn't have phone numbers registered with their accounts when they were alive, though they did have recovery email addresses. Some kind of recovery is fine. What' not fine is to enforce that you have to own an SMS-capable phone just to have an email address (or whatever).