Park your number with a voip firm. You'll get SMS via email. Use local pay-per-use sims wherever you travel. You do not need to maintain a US phone plan to keep a US phone number.
This solves the “voip number” problem.
No battery swelling?
I copied the idea and did the same, it's essentially free of cost to do so where I live, thanks to having operators that offer a pay-what-you-use tier with no fixed monthly cost. The line is just to act as a 2FA mule, so it means it costs nothing (save causing any kind of expense once every 6 months, but sending a single SMS does it, so I guess it actually costs something like 20cts per year)
Apart from the SMS Forwarder app [2] you suggested, an HN commenter [3] provided links to some FOSS alternative which I didn't get to try but should work fine and is ad-free.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28251107
[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.frzinapps....
The only minor hiccup I have had is that at some point the devices decide that enough time has passed that there must be a software update available ... and I ignore the prompts to do so ... which is fine ...
... but then there was a power outage and when they powered back on they were in some update status where they weren't online until I clicked something ? I forget ... might have been an updated google legal agreement with the update ?
They are google pixel devices with stock OS load and no apps added (other than that SMSForwarder) but even still, had some logic for software update that produced a minor annoyance.
Working well, albeit the Google login tends to give more problems than it should, in smaller and independent apps like these.
But I definitely observed that the one time that I left the phone plugged in for the most part of 3 months, the battery never was the same. It lost like a third of its capacity.
Have you used it? Do you know if it's only the GUI for ACC (i.e. that ACC must be installed independently), or if it already embeds ACC?
"Expired: Monday, July 17, 2023 at 13:21:09 Eastern Daylight Saving Time" per Safari.
* https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=kozubik.com
I had a nice acme.sh toolchain and process and then this silliness:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36252310
... all for a simple site that never needed SSL in the first place.
(luckily I only ran acme.sh in a stripped down jail)
And they will.
I signed up for my number in 2015, with a landline, because I had just purchased an Android tablet, with no SIM slot or mobile plan, so I decided that teh Goog was the best bet for VoIP for me.
You've got to guard your conversations on Voice, and don't mention forbidden keywords. Voice will instantly disconnect the call if it detects wrongthink.
I don't see how Google makes money on Google Voice, which makes wary of them shutting it down some day.
And Acrobits Softphone is a reliable SIP dialer for Android which is very light on battery life.