Strange iPhone Reboots

| May 22nd, 2015

Over the last couple of weeks, my iPhone 5S has been rebooting itself during the night. Once (last Saturday) it got stuck in a reboot loop on the Apple logo screen. Strangely, it seemed to be emitting some kind of tone every time it restarted… maybe that was my woken-at-3am brain imagining things, but I’m sure it also made a noise in the early hours of this morning when it rebooted.

The most annoying thing about this, is that it’s only happening at night, while I’m asleep. I know it’s happening because my lock screen tells me so, and I can’t use TouchID to unlock the phone. That, and the fact the display flashing up the stark white loading screen sometimes wakes me up. Throughout the day, everything appears fine. It’s really quite bizarre.

I’d reset the phone to factory settings, but there are a couple of security-related apps installed which would be a massive PITA to have to de-authorise and set up again.

Has anyone else experienced this?

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Google Account Epilogue

Chris M.

| May 21st, 2015

So after the saga which was getting rid of a legacy Google Apps service on my “main” Google Account, I had to create a new one. I thought it worth sharing the experience of this, to round out the story.

At first I setup the account with my primary email, with no need for a GMail account. This was straightforward enough, and I was able to setup 2-factor authentication, Chrome browser sync, and re-setup some of the mobile applications.

I had to re-verify my account via a SMS code for a number of services, even after setting up 2FA, which is no big deal really, but you’d think once would be enough.

After a couple of hours, I decided I wanted to make use of Google Now. To get the most out of it I would need to use GMail. No big deal, I can setup some forwarding and aliases to integrate this with Fastmail¹. Finding a usable address was the hard part. I must have spent a good 30-40 minutes coming up with and trying addresses only to find they were already taken. A “username90872@gmail.com” address would have worked, because I was setting up forwarding, but who actually wants an address like that? Completing the GMail setup brought a message that while my primary email on the account had now changed, I would still be able to login with the email address I had signed up with.

The Google mobile apps have a nice feature where, if you’re logged into one of them, it recognises your details and you can quickly login to the others. These all worked a treat, except the GMail account. The GMail app picked up that I was logged in to other apps with to my account fine, but trying to login kept coming back with an error. In the end I had to “login as someone else” and login with the GMail address + password instead of the other email address I was using as my login. A minor annoyance, and one which might catch some less technical people out.

YouTube was normal enough, but wanted me to choose between posting as myself, or creating a new Google+ page to post as. I don’t post to YouTube, and I wanted to keep my account as simple/clean as possible, so I went with myself even though I had a slight unease about it. If I did ever start a “channel” I’d probably want to call it something else, but that’s a problem for another day.

I feel a little better about my account situation now. Overall, Google’s account system is a deep rabbit warren of inconsistant WTF-ery, but once you make headway and get some of the key services setup, you should be more or less set.

Post still to come ↩

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Mistakes Were Made (Google Account Follow-up)

Chris M.

| May 18th, 2015

Earlier on I was trying to find a way to “downgrade” a Google Apps account to a personal account. Well, I found a way. Kinda. Ok, not really – I slipped up and deleted my Google account.

I was a bit naive about what removing a Google Apps subscription entailed. In the absence of any clear documentation, I ~~assumed~~ hoped it would remove the baggage of Google Apps, leaving me with a normal Google personal account (especially as the account predated Apps). It didn’t actually remove Google Apps… but it did remove my access to pretty much every useful Google service. I was locked out of Drive/Docs, Browser Sync… everything I use on a regular basis.

It turns out, that if you want to delete Google Apps, cancelling your subscription is only a partial measure. Whereas in most services “cancel subscription” means “I’m done, so remove all my stuff and let me go” if you want to cancel Apps then you have to cancel, and then do the non-obvious step of explicitly deleting your domain from the service.

At this point, my choice was: buy a new subscription to Apps, putting me back to square one – only paying for it, or completely delete everything to do with the Apps account. So deletion it was.

Eventually I tracked down where in the mess that is the Apps admin area I could find the delete domain button, held my breath, and clicked.

Milliseconds later I was dumped out of Google Apps, and everything was gone. Everything. Even the stuff you’d forgot about, like your Google+ profile, oAuth logins to other sites or logins on other devices, and accounts you forgot were merged, i.e. my YouTube account and subscriptions. My iPhone complained, WordPress complained, Feedly complained, Chrome complained, and so did many, many more! Years of settings, data, and integrations, gone in a button click.

Immediately I had a wave of regret, but also a slight sense of a weight being lifted. I no longer had to worry about the schizophrenic nature of my old account. If I wanted to try a new Google service, I didn’t have to wait for it to be Apps-enabled. Yes, a whole bunch of data was gone, but in a way, that was good. I would be starting over from scratch, without all the cruft that had accumulated over the many years.

So I guess it’s not that bad, really. Just a little inconvenient in the short-term. I’ve created a new account, relinked any complaining devices, and generally started rebuilding.

But please, Google, make the whole Apps/Account integration more user-friendly!

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Google Account Frustrations

Chris M.

| May 17th, 2015

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.