If I remove a secondary Google Account, will I lose apps?

[RolandStone]

I got my significant other a Note 4. I set her Gmail as the primary Google account and put myself down as a secondary account. (And I put my own VZW phone number on the phone too, and temporarily disabled VZW phone service on my Moto X 2013 just so I could play with her phone for a week.)

Much to my surprise, the Play Store has allowed me to install all my old apps, free and paid, onto her phone. And even though the Moto X doesn't work as a phone right now, all those apps are still there and working on the Moto X too.

What will happen to all those installed apps at the end of the week if I delete my Gmail account from her phone and reactivate my Moto X on VZW? Will my apps disappear from her Note 4?

 

[anon(5600632)]

The Play store doesn't care about your phone number - it only looks at your Google account. Any android with WiFi will work with the Play store even if no phone number is activated on the device. And once that account buys an app, the account owns it forever and can download it to any device signed in under that account. Your first phone probably had backup & restore on, so when you signed into a new phone under the same google account, it downloaded your apps.

So you can keep one phone activated but have your Google account signed in on multiple devices. I, for example, still keep an old phone around just in case - it doesn't even have a SIM, it can't access the carrier's network, but on WiFi its fully functional.

So you don't really need to delete the account from the second phone. If you do, the apps already installed will probably stay there (I say probably because I've never done this, but as far as I know, the Play store cannot remove apps). But devices no longer signed in under that account may no longer be able to download updates to those apps, at least not the purchased ones. Free ones should be fine.

 

[RolandStone]

The only reason I want to delete my Google account from the Note 4, is that I'd prefer not to have my Gmail accessible on her phone. (No, I'm not cheating on her - but hey I want my privacy! ;>) So I think I'm going to go ahead and delete it and see what happens. I could change the PW but then she'd probably get sign-in errors all the time.

 

[anon(5600632)]

Yea, that's a good security practice. Post what happens to the apps when you delete the account. We'll all learn something.