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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right.

I really hope that was a joke on your part. If there is one thing that was irritating it was how google would mix up and connect various accounts at random for no particular reason.

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My wording was poor, and Google certainly don't get them perfect. It does fundamentally work though - you can connect multiple users in web and mobile apps and switch between them as you see fit. Sometimes it does select the wrong account for whatever you were trying do (calendar used to do this a lot), but you can usually just switch to the correct account.

My main frustration is services that don't even get close to Google's implementation and user experience for multiple accounts, despite it serving as an example for many years. Like Trello, most seem to not even bother, while others like Dropbox seemed to do the worst combination of things possible.

I would argue that Google's account system is extremely poor.

What it considers your primary account is apparently the first one you add, so if the order is wrong, you have to sign out of all of them and start over [1].

But it's not exactly like that. Recently someone added me to a new Google Apps for Work (or whatever it's called this month) account, and now this new account is, mysteriously, the default account, even though I've had a different one for ages.

If you open Google Calendar, it will embed the account number in the URL (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render, for example), but this number obviously isn't static. If you have multiple devices and sign in elsewhere, the number might be wrong.

You also get this number as "?authuser=3" in every Google Hangout URL. But that number is yours — when people share a link like this, the recipient typically ends up opening GH for the wrong account. Google Hangouts is notoriously finicky about accounts, and the loading screen will often hang if you happen to be using the wrong one for a particular hangout ID. Sometimes GH shows the (tiny, dark gray) account switching link, sometimes not. (Hangouts is generally a disaster when it comes to actually starting one.)

[1] http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/13/set-default-google-account-mu...

I have many frustrations with Google's multiple accounts. I use multiple personal accounts, a personal Google Apps, a business Google Apps, and a self-hosted (university) Google Apps.

I've found the best solution is to create bookmarks for GMail and Calendar with the URL like you mentioned, except you can use your email address in place of the number (that is, in stead of/b/3/ you can do /b/user@gmail.com/).

Not perfect, but I hope this helps!

I think rogerbinns's point boils down to "at least Google has an account switcher".

> I would argue that Google's account system is extremely poor.

You are comparing them against what they could have done. Yes, there are pieces of friction. However when compared against services that do nothing at all about multiple accounts, it is a considerable improvement!

Sometimes. I find that ~90% (number from no where, I know..) links between apps usually work correctly. It's really really noticeable though when you open calendar from work gmail and I'm looking at my family calendar. Using the account switcher from that point is really easy, but it's very jarring when it doesn't do what you expect by default.

It has worked nearly flawless for me for at least 5 years (and I don't recall beyond that). I say "nearly," because a few niche products (maybe AdMob dashboards, or Analytics, I forget which) don't work with multiple accounts.

And still does daily. Try having multiple email accounts and trying to use the GoogleDrive Web UI from more than one at once ... not bad for a ~$400+ BN company !

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