Before I get started with my little rant I wanted to say that I am not bashing Android in any way, just a little frustrated with a little aspect of it, and am seeking a solution. I give a huge amount of credit to the developers! But, if anyone has any suggestions for me, please feel free to comment or send me an email at oldandroidsite@gmail.com (or via twitter: @oldandroidsite).
If you are an email “power user” like I am you probably have a bunch of email addresses on your Android phone. One problem that I have seen on my Android device is that the Market app gets confused about which account to attach your apps to when you download them. For example I have my main email address that I use for everything and then an email address that I use for my website plus and email for my Android apps. I also even have a SPAM email address that I use for signing up for stuff that I don’t want to get email from.
The problem lies when I check that email than go into market to download an app. It seems to attach the download to that email address instead of my primary email account. So what I decided to do to combat this is to reload my secondary emails and see what happens. To do this I went into the Settings – Accounts & Sync menu and selected one of my secondary emails. Then just press “Remove Account” twice (once on the initial screen, than again on the popup) and the account is gone. For this experiment I made a quick list of the apps that were attached to this secondary account, just incase they all went away, but fortunately they are all still there.
The next step of the experiment was to verify if the apps were still attached to me in Market. Apparently they aren’t. They are still installed, but kind of in the dark when it comes to the Market app. If I am to do a search for an app that I know needed an update, once I find it does still show that the update is needed, but only then does it attach to the primary email account. This seems like a lot of effort just to fix an annoyance with the phone. The hardest part of the whole process is that I now have around 50 apps on my phone that aren’t going to update because they aren’t attached to the Market.
Another solution that I see is that the (Root Only) app Titanium Backup has an option that will “Attach Market” if you long press on an app if gives that option. The downside to this is that the feature is only available through the donation version of the app, which I highly recommend, but can totally understand that not everyone is willing to part with the handful of dollars for an app like that, especially if it is just because of this annoyance.
The last attempt that I am trying is the download an app called Zemna Applist Backup which is an application that takes all of your apps and creates a document with all of the Android market links. This seems to work, but you still have to know which ones aren’t already associated with your primary account. PLUS, once you click on the “orphaned” apps they just show up as installed and the only way to reassign them is to uninstall and reinstall them, which could take hours with 50+ apps.
Anyone out there have any suggestions?
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