De-sync assistance required

[Wild Hoss]

My wife just upgraded, and we have passed her Optimus S down to my son. Its not set up with Sprint, we simply intend for him to use it as WiFi device for playing games and so we can send him email, and possibly IM. Kind of introducing him to smartphones, and as a means where we might contact him when we take short trips out of the house as we have no landline phone.

Problem: it is apparently still synced with her contacts. When I got on his phone and changed my contact info to "Dad" for instance, it also changed on my wife's new phone. (Now she gets texts from "Dad", LOL) I also re-arranged her favorites, and lo and behold, the wife's were re-arranged as well. At a loss here.

I also wonder if this is why yahoo! Messenger (and another version I installed as well) would not work. I created a yahoo! account for him and installed yahoo! Messenger on my phone and it operates fine, but on his phone I would never show up as being online.

Any dumbed-down suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[epidenimus]

The phone is still tied to her gmail account and syncing contacts, etc. If this is a stock recovery and ROM, then do a factory reset via the privacy menu.
If it is running a custom recovery or ROM, instead do a wipe and then a fresh install of the ROM. Do NOT do a factory reset via the Privacy menu if using a custom recovery or ROM.

When it comes back up, use his gmail account and any others that you wish to add. Of course, be sure to put in your wifi router info and connect. You may also wish to disable the data, so that it doesn't kill the battery life looking for it.

 

[Wild Hoss]

That makes sense...I guess I wasn't aware the contacts are tied to gmail as I never did that with mine.

Is there a means to unsync the gmail without doing a factory reset, and hence losing Angry Birds and everything else we've got on it? Can I trash the gmail app for instance? Forgive me if that's a ridiculously simple question. I just don't want to do something that I cannot fix...and that ain't much.

 

[epidenimus]

OMG, you don't know how many people I have had back out of rooting and ROMing simply because they would lose their stupid Angry Birds progress. Unbelievable. You would have to manually delete all of your wife's other stuff then, such as texts, contacts, shopping apps, bookmarks, etc.

I think you can delete the primary Gmail account via Accounts and Sync, but to truly untie it, a clean install is probably the way to go. I have not tried to do it this way before; maybe someone else here has.

 

[Wild Hoss]

Hey, its not my Angry Birds bro! Grade schoolers get MAD about this stuff, so you have to tread carefully.

I was messing with it an turned off the sync to gmail...I'll see if that works. If not, I guess I'll set aside some time for a factory reset...and by that I assume it is what it sounds like, resetting to where it was when it came out of the box. The basic apps (Text, Music, Camera etc) will all still be there correct? Its not going to turn the phone into a blank brick?

 

[epidenimus]

Hey, its not my Angry Birds bro! Grade schoolers get MAD about this stuff, so you have to tread carefully.

I have a 29yo and a 38yo in my office who were all about ROMing until the potential loss of Angry Birds scores came up. I don't get it. Do those little piggies really piss people off that much? Am I surrounded by repressed Kamikazes?

I was messing with it an turned off the sync to gmail...I'll see if that works. If not, I guess I'll set aside some time for a factory reset...and by that I assume it is what it sounds like, resetting to where it was when it came out of the box. The basic apps (Text, Music, Camera etc) will all still be there correct? Its not going to turn the phone into a blank brick?

If it is a stock ROM, then you are correct. It should also not erase any of your SD card contents, so you should have your media files still, too. Take it out when you do it if you want to be sure.

 

[Wild Hoss]

Well, yeah...that could be annoying. Worse than Adele even.

Its stock ROM, so I might give it a shot unless he's going to throw a fit over Angry Birds. I can't get my yahoo ID to show up on Messenger for him no matter what I do...beyond frustrating. I don't think I can sync the yahoo! contacts without doing gmail as well, so they might both have to go into the drink with a reset.

If 'Birds is on the SD card, won't to come through the reset though?

 

[epidenimus]

I've only played with YIM a bit and I do remember having issues where I had to log on with a PC web browser and accept invites in order to get them to work. You might try that if you haven't yet.

If 'Birds is on the SD card, won't to come through the reset though?

I'm pretty sure that stock ROM does not have app to sd enabled. Perhaps the data would be retained, but I am not sure.

 

[Wild Hoss]

Well I got it to work on all our phones, even though I must have looked like an ass sitting there at McDonald's with three cellphones.

I wish I'd have read your last post regarding using PCs before I'd left though...man it was a pain getting this done on the devices. IDK if its just a bad app, but its certainly not very intuative and not particulally well-designed from a functional standpoint insofar as mobiles IMO. Oh well...its free. You get what you pay for!

Appreciate the help bro!

 

[hlxanthus]

If you dont mind rooting the device, you could use titanium backup to save all app data (including all those game saves LOL). Then (as long as you dont install a custom recovery) perform a factory reset to break the google login/sync. Android will not let you unsync your google account any other way, I have tried. Then you can reroot, reinstall titanium backup and restore the data for desired games/apps.

 

[epidenimus]

As far as IM goes, I am a fan of pidgin on the desktop and either imo or xabber on the mobile device. Multiprotocol without ads.

 

[Buddlespit]

Just out of curiosity, why not just go into Menu --> Accounts and delete your wife's account? Wouldn't that stop the sync? Or, has that been tried?

 

[hlxanthus]

If you try and remove that account from the settings menu you get a box that says

Remove account

This account is required by some applications. You can only remove it by resetting the phone to factory defaults (which deletes all your personal data). You do that in the settings application, under Privacy.

Ok

On a side note, atleast on cyanogenmod7, from this menu you CAN uncheck sync contacts and sync calendar which will accomplish much of the same thing that you want to do.