fid02 Thanks to your helpful instructions, I was finally able to create a throwaway G account without tying it to my phone number. Thank you!
I immediately switched the G account of Play Store from my previous throwaway account (account A) that was tied to my phone number to the new throwaway account that is NOT tied to my phone number (account B), then deleted account A.
But now the issue is that when I go to the Play Store, click the account icon on the top right, click Manage apps & devices
, I get the message Something went wrong. Try again.
under the Updates
section.
When I click Free up space
, none of the apps I previously installed using account A show up, and the list of Apps installed using the Play Store is blank. I assume this is because the metadata of the apps I previously downloaded using account A is tied to the now-deleted account A, which is why nothing is showing up as installed under account B.
The biggest advantage of using sandboxed Play Store for app installs is seamless app downloads and updates, but it seems like I'm no longer able to do this with this fragmentation of G accounts between the app's associated account A and the Play Store's account B.
I searched various resources (link1, link2, link3), and the possible solutions seem to be:
- Clear cache & storage of Play Store and relaunch
- Uninstall app installed using previous account, login to Play Store with the new account, re-download same app with new account
I tried approach 1, but that didn't work, even after a device restart. I also tried downloading a random app (tried with AccuWeather) with account B, and while that resolves the Something went wrong. Try again.
error of the Updates
section, only AccuWeather shows up on the list of installed apps, so I assume I won't get updates for my other apps already downloaded with account A.
Based on my experiment with AccuWeather, I assume approach 2 would work, but that means I have to go through the process of re-installing and re-configuring every app installed from the Play Store, so I would like to leave this as an absolute last resort if nothing else works.
Does anyone have any advice of how to resolve this without needing to re-install every app using the new account?