Useful to know if you frequently flash

[G+_Daniel Gregory]

Useful to know if you frequently flash. This is a neater rephrasing of the issue and resolution that I had figured out for myself...

 

Originally shared by Farran

 

Fan of flashing your phone(s) and/or tablets with different ROMs?

 

Then you may well have encountered this, or a similar error, before.

 

"Couldn't sign in, possibly because there's a problem with Google account permissions."

 

Here's how to fix it.

 

It only took a small amount of digging to find the fix to this (as I had a similar problem only last week), but searching for this string revealed almost no useful results, so I thought it worth posting about. (It's 4am and I'm mostly guessing, so don't take this as fact.)

 

Signing into Google through anything requires tokens. Looking at the number of elements in the authorisation settings page, it appears you have about 280 available tokens. Most people probably won't ever use these up, but people like me who a) like to sign into anything and everything, if only to see what happens, and b) keep reflashing their Android device will almost certainly max this out at least once. I've had to deal with this page once in the distant past (about a year ago - I'm only 21 :P), so it had moved when I tried to find it this time around.

 

Errors like this really should be handled by Google better:

· automatic removal of seriously damned old and inactive tokens (probably beneficial to security anyway)

· actually telling you what the damn issue is

· suggesting how to fix it

· not being so bloody generic ("problem with permissions")

· perhaps linking to a place where you could fix it

 

THE FIX

1. First visit accounts.google.com/IssuedAuthSubTokens . This page contains all sites, apps and other services that have been granted an access token. (This page can be found through security.google.com/settings/security ? Connected applications and sites)

2. Start clicking buttons! But obviously be careful. If you're not really sure what's safest to remove, search for "Android Login Service". If you have quite a few, then it's probably pretty safe to remove the oldest ones. 

3. Clear out some more - whilst you're there, you may as well cut out some of the other clutter. Go for entries nearest the bottom of the list, which you don't really recognise, and ones you know you no longer use.

 

Make yourself a cup of tea and some scones though, as the page takes bloody ages to load between each access revision. 

 

 

h/t to Daniel Gregory for posting about it the other day - nobody else seemed to know what might be causing it!