Last night and most of the day today the blogosphere was all the rage over Google Music and Google’s supposed changes to Google Music’s authorized device policy. The official authorized device limit on Google Music gives you an ample 10 devices. This includes phones, tablets, and computers. Google tracks devices by identifiers such as your computer’s MAC address or mobile identifiers such as IMEI or MEID numbers.
It was reported over and over again that Google was now limiting the number of devices that can be deauthorized from your Google Music account. The change that was noticed last night and earlier today allowed for a maximum of 4 devices to be removed or deauthorized from your account per year.
(Image credit: Android Police)
To the average user, this is a moot point giving you a total of 14 authorized devices to use Google Music with over the course of a year. However, to the crack ROM flasher and phone reviewer, this change had people worried. Every time you flash a new ROM onto your tablet or phone, a duplicate device is added to Google Music upon reauthorizing your device. If you’re one of the many Android device reviewers in the world, this news was upsetting as well. Device reviewers are constantly adding and removing devices to their accounts for testing purposes.
This all started last night when this thread popped up on an XDA forum. Users were reporting problems removing devices from Google Music. Immediately, without contacting Play Store Support, this news spread like wildfire. Conclusions were immediately drawn that Google was turning their backs on the root community and cracking down in similar fashion as to Google Movies and root in the past.
Let’s step back and take a look at this for a moment. Google actively supports the AOSP community. It’s everywhere from groups to factory images. They support us. Google has also recently spent an extremely large amount of money rebranding and revamping their ecosystem to Google Play. It has also been rumored that Google is not happy with the success or lack thereof with Play Music and are rumored to be offering recording firms upwards of one billion dollars for their entire music catalog. With that type of investment, you don’t ignore a large portion of your user base and community. It’s borderline insane to think that root users and device reviewers would be shut out from one of Google’s latest ventures.
This morning some users started to report that they actually attempted to fact check before grabbing their pitchforks. They contacted Google via their new Play Store Support line. The support representatives were extremely helpful. They informed users that they would remove the devices in question from their account and reset their deauthorization number back to zero. The support reps also told customers that this was a known issue and a solution was in the works.
In the end, this entire fiasco could have been avoided if a little fact checking was done. At the time of this writing, numerous users from around the web are reporting that they can now remove and deauthorize unwanted devices once again. Thanks Google for actively resolving this issue to appease the masses. If you’re having problems still, please contact Google Play Support. Good luck!