Your card info stays safe When you use your phone to pay in stores, Android Pay doesn’t send your actual credit or debit card number with your payment. Instead we use a virtual account number to represent your account info – so your card details stay safe and secure.
So, just as trackable as a credit card number. Or are virtual account numbers unique per transaction?
As a cash-paying German I think that the main appeal to me is that cash payments are a process you can easily understand in its entirety, whereas everything else comes with an infinite supply of unknowns big and small. Sure, it's easy to grasp the basic and get adequate working knowledge, but there will always be lines in the fine print, lines in the code and lines in the physical specs of the hardware that you never read and even if you did you may not have understood correctly. You don't have to worry about these things, but you could, and that seems to be enough for many to stick to what they know.
Also, not paying cash feels lazy, some stereotypes might apply. (Now I wonder about the possibility of a correlation between cash and the protestant/catholic divide still present as a cultural shadow of the past even amongst decidedly atheist Germans - payment customs in the nordics suggest otherwise though)