'splain me how email accounts and android work...

So I am transferring all my stuff from my old 3G to my new 4G Android phone. Apparently, somehow when I first set this phone up I downloaded the youtube app and my youtube username and password became one of the accounts associated with the android. My gmail was still the primary but many (most) of the apps were downloaded under this account. I'd like to correct this issue with the new one. Is there any way to re-associate all of those downloads to my gmail account?

Your Google account isn't like an Apple ID. You don't have anything like iCloud on your Android phone. If you want to back up settings and apps, you'll have to do it manually. There's a great app that people love called Titanium Backup. I recommend that to people wanting to wanting to backup apps and settings on Android.

When you add a new account to your Android phone, the only thing that does is allow your phone to sync information between your phone and the app's host site. For example, if you set up an account for your work email, it allows Android to download the email without having to log in to the app. Otherwise you'd have to open up the app and log in with your username and password every time you wanted to download your work email. Same deal for Facebook. Creating a Facebook account allows you to receive information from Facebook.com on your phone without opening the app or the Facebook website and logging into your account. I think right now this information is mostly limited to friends' contact information.

But yeah, if you're worried about automatic backups of your apps and settings, Android doesn't do that. It does back up your contacts, though. Some phones will ask you every time you want to add a new contact if you want to add it to the phone, your Google account, or whatever other contact-capable apps or accounts you have set up on the phone. If the phone isn't prompting you each time you add a new contact, it's probably adding contacts directly to Google. Double check that before taking my word, as every Android phone can be different.

Oh, also, if for some reason you have multiple Google accounts, you can choose which one you are using to purchase apps in the Market by hitting the Menu button (with Market open), then Accounts. If you change it once, it should remember the setting until you change it again.

no... your (android) phone is joined by the hip with the gmail account that you register the phone under. I pretty much gave up the apps downloaded with the youtube account as lost. No biggie. The phone is clean now and I think I had just one app that I paid for. 99 cents is no big deal.

Quote from dealgate : no... your (android) phone is joined by the hip with the gmail account that you register the phone under. I pretty much gave up the apps downloaded with the youtube account as lost. No biggie. The phone is clean now and I think I had just one app that I paid for. 99 cents is no big deal.

Don't know about the youtube account, but I would remove that account from your phone under account and settings, open up every other app by google and make sure they all work. Also in settings under your apps clear the user data for youtube. Now for me, when I open youtube app and go to account it asks do I want to do it under my main account or another account. You should be able to add the 2nd account, but since you opened up all of googles other apps they all hopefully will remain under your main account.

You can log into the market on your computer with the YouTube account info. It will at least tell you what you had downloaded and installed, but you'd still have to redownload them on your phone with the new Gmail account.
Basically NO you can't transfer the stuff from one account to the other. You might be able to export the contacts and import them to the new Gmail account. Not sure how though.

Quote from BostonGirl : You can log into the market on your computer with the YouTube account info. It will at least tell you what you had downloaded and installed, but you'd still have to redownload them on your phone with the new Gmail account. Basically NO you can't transfer the stuff from one account to the other. You might be able to export the contacts and import them to the new Gmail account. Not sure how though.

Yeah this is one of the things Google needs to fix. Also, being able to remove Android devices from an associated google account would be awesome. I have had the problem of flashing too many ROMs, singing into my Google account, and now I have something like 20 different devices associated with my Google Play account. .

However what Mixels said is a sort of half-truth. It does back up your apps, but it doesn't always seem to restore them. I always have to redownload them from the Play Store. Sometimes it'll do it, sometimes it won't. But then again I'm using different devices, and I think it's only supposed to be for the same device, if you lost it or was stolen maybe.