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Technical: Andriod updates failing

26 Jun 2010

As an aside from our website or development related news, these are brief, technical comments about a recent Android/Google related glitch/problem we experienced which caused battery life to reduce, updated contact details to be lost, and updates  to fail (market or system).  Hopefully it may be of use if others experience the same issue.

[By way of background: from late 2005, UK-based individuals signing up to Google's Gmail service were forced to adopt addresses at @googlemail.com.  This related to a trademark infringement which has since been resolved.]

In 2009, a HTC Magic phone was received, complete with the Google Android operating system. When Android-based phones are first configured, one needs to specify a Google-account to associate the phone with (required in order to synchronise contacts, calendar events and other information). This was done, and the phone worked great.

Fast forward to April 2010, and due to the trademark resolution, Google started to allow its @googlemail.com users in the UK to switch to using a @gmail.com domain. The change would apparently be transparent, and emails sent to both addresses would be received.  The person with the Android phone chose to do this.

Over the next 2-3 weeks, strange things started to occur:

1. Firstly, battery usage on the phone dropped through the floor; barely lasting 12 hours with next-to-no usage (with a substantial amount of battery time allocated to 'Google Applications', of which none were specifically being used).
2. Secondly, contact updates were not being saved; a changed number would be entered, but within minutes would have disappeared!
3. Thirdly, updates were failing: none of the application or system updates were completing (they would stall when selected, and have to be cancelled).

During this time, no particular error or notification messages were given.

It turns out that this failure was being caused by changing the associated email address tied to the phone.  However, as it didn't appear to be possible to change this associated address on the phone, the email address was changed back to @googlemail.com via the Gmail site.  Almost instantly the updates restarted, and the battery life returned to normal (typically 2 days).

If anyone else has experienced these symptoms and has recently switched their Google email address, we'd suggest switching it back to rectify the issues. Clearly changing the address causes a validation procedure to fail, which in turn prevented contact information from being saved, and updates from downloading. Presumably it also led to the Google applications continuously attempting to validate, causing the battery life to drain.

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