Tag Archives: paid apps

Adding additional account to Android phone and buying paid apps in India

After paid apps were introduced in Android market for Indian users, I wanted to buy a couple of them. But it took me a couple of days to do it, because of a variety of related and un-related issues. I thought of documenting it here, so that it would be useful for others who are facing the same problem.

The first issue that I faced was that, I have associated my phone with my Google App account and not a regular gmail account. Because of this, I was not able to use Google Checkout to buy paid apps. To fix this, I was supposed to add another Google account that has Google checkout enabled.

The second issue is that, there is some bug in android which doesn’t allow you to add additional accounts. The symptom of this bug is that you will get a error message which says “You don’t have a network connection”, even though you are connected through wifi or gprs. It took me a couple of days to figure out that it is a bug. Searching the internet revealed, that this bug is found across devices and across Android OS versions. I really wonder why Google has not fixed it yet.

Anyways, after searching sometime, I found out a relatively easy fix. You can try to add the account using the Youtube app. The following are the steps to do that.

  • Open up your Youtube app
  • Select menu –> My account and then click Add Account. Enter the new email address
  • Go back to your home screen and then select Menu -> Settings -> Accounts & sync
  • Set sync settings there and put in the password when prompted

Now you can go to the Market app and start buying paid apps. 🙂

Posted in Android/Java | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments