Peter wrote:
Deleting it in the camera, or in Gallery, doesn’t delete it from DB
You have to use Google Drive or possibly also OneDrive will work. With Google Drive you can delete on the phone and it will be deleted all over, at any device and vice versa. All my photos are uploaded to both google drive and onedrive (don’t actually remember why I also use OneDrive…) I can’t see anything useful with DB, other than perhaps shearing, but why would you share photos indiscriminately?
That’s more than likely true. Why should they care about free apps?
I can report one very positive experience. Last night I tried to buy Tomtom GO (the new seemingly worldwide one, with an “interesting” price structure of 50 free miles per month, or £35 per 3 years for unlimited 
) The purchase (paypal payment) kept failing with “suspicious transaction”. I recall having this before on the Samsung tablet and somehow solved it on that. Anyway, reinventing the wheel is the world’s second oldest occupation and this issue is all over the internet, and some googling turned up this site with the 855… US phone number. So I called it (VOIP, $0.01/minute, on my Nokia) not expecting anything, but I got right through to an extremely pleasant and helpful lady at google who knew “everything”, worked through it “with her team”, and sorted it out. Almost no rubbish was asked for from me (a UK firm would have wanted my father’s middle name etc) because it was obvious who I was from the context. A rare positive experience on the internet, and it’s interesting that google have obviously made a policy decision to offer a level of customer service which nobody else I know gets anywhere near. And this is supporting a “free” program (Android, with its cheap apps), not paying advertisers (like me at work, £600/month, and yes we get a good phone number from google for that one, as one would expect).
One funny thing I found. You can set up the device to upload all photos to dropbox (only if on wifi, optionally). But this is only one-way. So if you take a pic which is really crappy (or compromising 
) it will be up there, visible to anybody who has the URL to that DB folder. Deleting it in the camera, or in Gallery, doesn’t delete it from DB. To get rid of it you have to start the DB app and delete it there, and be online for a bit. Only an anorak would be looking out for this sort of thing, so I can see a lot of people having a whole lot of “fun”
No luck setting up Csipsimple VOIP for Didlogic… too many ways to get it wrong. Keep getting “authentication error”.
I’m not sure there is a limit (or if there is, it isn’t enforced). I’ve got 600+ devices all logging in using the same iTunes store credentials. We only use free apps though.
Perhaps they only care about paid apps?
Peter wrote:
Apple deal with this by keeping track of all your IOS devices and allowing IIRC five reinstalls.
That’s not right. Apple allow you to re-install apps on as many devices as are registered to your account, simultaneously or sequentially. There is a limit of 10 devices at once on your account, but you can remove them whenever, so unless you’ve got more than 10 iPhones and iPads it’s not an issue. The limit of 5 relates to DRM’ed iTunes content, like songs and videos.
Yes, data in the file system is not stored that way but that is a rather rare thing to have nowadays. In your OziExplorer case, you’d have to store that data somewhere else as a backup but it rarely originates from the phone anyway.
If I lose my phone today, I would lose exactly nothing in terms of data. I make sure all data creating/storing services I use have a cloud sync feature.
Well that’s interesting, and it certainly isn’t what I find digging around backup info on the internet.
Plus there are apps which need to be sideloaded e.g. Oziexplorer. Or anything else which didn’t come via the appstore.
I have replaced my Android phone 5 times so far and every time the new phone was registered with Google with the same account and it got all settings, data, apps. In the Google Play store, you pay per account, not per device and switching the device does not mean you have to purchase again.
I never felt the need for a backup solution on top of that.
I mean a total backup of the entire device, in the sense that most people would understand “total”.
The phone has several ways of backing up “everything” to “the cloud” but these won’t restore a phone which was obtained to e.g. replace a lost/broken one. These methods just basically back up user data (messages, passwords, etc). Not apps you paid for.
There are subtle issues with doing a total backup, because it enables the creation of multiple devices all containing copies of licensed software, and every device after the 1st one will have bootleg copies running. Apple deal with this by keeping track of all your IOS devices and allowing IIRC five reinstalls. Google didn’t want to get involved in that, it seems.
That is why Titanium Backup needs a rooted device, and yes it can presumably be used to create multiple cloned phones. With great power comes a need for responsible behaviour
It still doesn’t deal with apps which are IMEI-locked but I haven’t seen any on Android – or at least have not noticed any. Symbian had that a lot, which was a PITA when you had to restore a backup but the original software outfit had vanished. I lost some really valuable apps that way. OTOH there are probably apps which will fake the IMEI presented to the app – Symbian had that facility eventually. Normally there is no practical way to rewrite the actual IMEI. Presumably Apple ban developers from IMEI locking, because it would make a mess of their backups.
On Windows this is trivial – use Trueimage (etc) to do an image backup of the whole hard drive. But I don’t believe there is an equivalent app for Android, which creates an image backup of the whole flash chip.
Maybe you need that for Android 1.0 but my Nexus backs up everything, even WiFi passwords. Or you can chose to reset it to 100% “clean” if you wish.
It also turns out that one cannot do an Iphone-type of “total backup” without rooting the android phone. This is obviously very important… see here
Why google didn’t make a provision for this is mind-boggling. It is the one really outstanding feature of IOS; you can lose your Iphone and get another one and restore everything onto it. Well, there is still the I-messages thing
