2 (Or More) Android Devices (Pads or Phones) On The SAME Google Play Account (Same e-Mail)

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  by Anura Guruge

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The answer is ‘YES’,
can be done, not a problem, works well — just need a bit of fiddling with
‘Options‘ >> ‘My Orders & Settings‘ to get it all set up nicely.

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I wasn’t sure whether this would work properly, i.e., having two identical Google Nexus 7 tablets on the SAME Google Play account (accessed with the one G-mail e-mail address). But, it does.

I Googled it and noticed that I wasn’t the 1st to have ‘worried’ about this. I also realized that there were no unequivocal answers. The goal of this post is to say, YES it can be DONE, it works well and is not a problem.

If you have two different products, e.g., phone and a tablet, it will be a piece of cake and you will not have to do anything. You will see two DIFFERENT icons. So when downloading or deleting Apps just make sure you select the right icon.

In my case the two devices were the same, down to the 8 GB storage size; one each for the two young kids. Got the first one, pre-ordered, in mid-July, the day it became available and the second, this month, for an October 10 birthday.

Yes, I have multiple g-mail accounts, BUT wanted, for simplicity, both on my ‘main’, ‘everyday’ account so I can keep an eye on them both without having to swap in-and-out of accounts, which would also mess up all my other Google log-ins.

The second Nexus ONLY appeared after my daughter started downloading APPs.

To start with, Google, who should know and do better, identified the two devices by the ‘Last Used‘ date. That is pretty useless, since both devices were used that day. Google has another metric, which would have been MORE germane, registration date. But, they don’t use that. That is STUPID. Registration date is more meaningful than date last used if you have identical devices.

As you can see from the 2nd screenshot (above) there is a Nickname field. Setting it, however, is not as obvious as it should be. You need to click ‘Edit >‘ on the RIGHT and then click update. You might even have to do that more than once! I had to, on the 2nd, ‘Devanee’, tablet. But, I got it to work.

Then I went to the APP store. When I select an APP, I now have the option as to which tablet I want it sent to. BINGO. Perfect. I tried it. Works.

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Tablets, as with smart phones, do nothing for me. They are too small. I am a BIG screen person. Got the tablets for the kids.

I hate that they play games on them. I hate computer games. Think it is mindless, as mindless as doing drugs. Though I started working with computers in 1969 I never found computer games interesting, let alone compelling. Yes, it could very well have been that the early games, in the 70s or even in the 80s, were horrendously bad. I would see folks, at work, playing ‘space dungeons‘ or whatever on a command line (type in) interface. As a part of my degrees, both in computers, I had to write some basic computer games. I still remember one which I had to do in 1972 — 40 years ago. You know the KNIGHT in Chess, with its ‘L’ shaped movements.

So here is what we had to do. We had to write a program, in Fortran IV, to move one KNIGHT (from any given arbitrary position on the board) across as many squares on a standard, chess board, without going over any previously traveled squares. The goal was to cover as many squares as possible from that starting point. The goal here was to concoct the BEST algorithm, by trial and error. I must have spent 100s of hours on this, over a 3 month period, working and reworking my program to get it better and better. To me that is fun. Playing games is too mindless.

I can even remember the book in which that problem was.

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I have to say I am impressed with the Nexus 7. The price is RIGHT! That was one of the reasons I got it; that it was made by Asus (my preferred PC maker) and sold by Google was the other. My only gripe is that it does not have two cameras. That is awkward. The GPS works well. The display really is HD. For $199, I wouldn’t get anything else.