Google Account Frustrations

I like to think of myself as generally a smart person. I have my weaknesses, but I’m usually pretty good at figuring something out – particularly if it’s tech related. Problem solving is generally one of my strong points.

So why, oh why, can I not figure out how to “downgrade” or migrate a Google Apps account to a “normal” Google account?

For background, I have a legacy Google Apps account, from when I used to run my own-domain email account through the service. I switched to Fastmail a couple of years ago, but by this point the Apps account was my “main” Google account – the one I was logged into all the time and thus had my data attached to.

I wanted to get rid of the Apps part of the account, as it causes some weird issues now and again, doesn’t work with all Google services, and I don’t use it for the intended purpose any more.

But it’s increasingly looking like this might not be possible. I can think of a number of enterprise-y reasons why not, but I can also think of a few use cases where it should be possible to at least allow it. I’ll keep hunting for now.