You still need a phone number to create an account. This just lets you hide it, and lets you share a chosen username with new contacts rather than your phone number, but you still have to provide the phone number to signal.
No. You still need to use a phone number to create an account. The proposed feature lets you pick a username so that you can have people contact you via the username, and you won’t have to tell people what your phone number is. You would be able to change your username at any time, and usernames all have a random two-digit number suffix.
Yeah I guess I jumped the gun there. I do wonder why they can’t just give the option to create an account instead of using a phone number. Requiring a phone is too limiting.