It’s hardly news to Australians that Google services aren’t available worldwide — we didn’t see music sales until April this year, for instance. However, something you might not realise is that those differences in global availability mean you shouldn’t update apps for viewing books, music or movies when travelling, or you’ll risk losing all that in-flight and on-the-road entertainment you so carefully collated.
In a forum post, John O’Donnell explained how updating his Google Play app while in Singapore resulted in his losing access to all his books, since Books aren’t yet offered by Google in Singapore. He didn’t lose permanent access to the books, but he wasn’t able to re-download them until he was back in a country where that content was available via Google.
The easy (and obvious) way to avoid this problem is to never update apps when you’re on the road. For anything that involves paid-for content, that seems like a sensible move. However, it’s a reminder that for all the convenience of ebooks, it’s far too easy for our access to be cut off as well as granted.
Current Liblicense Archive [via Boing Boing via Gizmodo ]
Comments
3 responses to “Don’t Update Google Play Apps When You’re On The Road”
The problem is the DRM, not the App Update.
The solution is to not buy DRM poisoned material.
People who buy DRM material are supporting a multi-flawed model. This being one of the many flaws.
DRM isn’t/hasn’t and wont stop piracy, it’s merely penalising the honest majority by making them pay for an inferior product!
Here’s a fun thing. I was recently travelling around Africa and had bought the Lonely Planet guide in Google Play books. I had it on my Samsung 7.7 tablet.
I wasn’t connecting to wifi with the tablet. It was just for video, ebooks ect.
However randomly a few times it’d stop letting me access the book or any of them, saying I needed to re-sign into my Google account to do so. So the whole Play Books app would became useless until the next time I could get wifi. Not ideal for when you’re spending months in the third world, often in remote places. Where one day it works, the next it doesn’t and it’s useless for weeks.
There are similar problems with moving accounts between Apple stores. You can get into a dreadful tangle trying to update apps you bought in one country, which can’t be updated in another. I had a long phone conversation with someone from Cupertino after a support call got escalated, which pretty much confirmed that they have little clue about how anything works outside the US.
I deleted Google Play Books from my iPad last night as it would not let me read epubs I had uploaded without signing in.
Poor WiFi where I was and when I moved to get coverage I logged into the wrong account.
It is not an eReader so it is not much use to me.
I like to read ebooks when travelling and Qantas are not giving me in flight WiFi – yet!