Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Thu, 14 Sep 2017
Looks like your Google Account can't go here
This was the enigmatic error message that we fought with all evening long:
"Looks like your Google Account can't go here"
But what could it mean?
The Background
My partner and I were trying to figure out how to set up an email account on the ubiquitous Gmail platform for her 10 year old son. The 10 year old part is important -- Google won't allow you to have an email address under its normal terms unless you're 13 year of age or older. The solution they offer is a thing called Family Link, which allows you to give your child an Android device with limited access to most Google services.
What Google doesn't make particularly obvious, and what their phone support agent also didn't know (he hadn't even heard of Family Link, which is apparently a new service this year) is that the only way to make it work is on an Android device. You may not use a Mac, or a Windows machine, or a Linux machine, or an iOS device, or even a Chromebook that runs Android apps (as some of them do). It needs to run Android as its base OS, or it just won't work.
My partner had acquired a Chromebook that runs Android apps, thinking quite reasonably that this would be sufficient to the task. Her reason was sound: school is teaching on actual computers equipped with keyboards, so that's the most sensible thing to have at home. Only after re-reading the descriptions very very carefully, and spending half an hour on the phone with the aforementioned clueless but engaged phone agent, did we figure out what the problem was.
Great, Just Tell Me What the Error Means
The bit that probably brought you here, though, is that useless error message. We kept running into it, everywhere we tried to go with this new Junior Google account. Log into Gmail? "Doesn't work here" Log into YouTube? "Doesn't work here" Log into Docs? You get the picture. The key is, we were trying this from regular computers, and not from the one and only one blessed Android device.
I finally pulled out my recent Huawei 8" tablet (which thankfully runs Android 7, about which more later), created a new user, and was able to finish the process, activating the Family Link account. We both breathed a sigh of relief: after claiming the son's name as a Gmail address 8 years ago, then losing access to it due to changing email accounts and overly-cautious account recovery algorithms, we were not eager to burn this slightly longer one as well. (Apparently, even if we could recover the originally-camped address, existing Gmail accounts can't be converted to Family Link accounts in any case.) She hoped to secure him a reasonably respectable and neutral Gmail address -- leave it to him to come up with a quirky and convention-defying address once he knows what he's doing online. Nothing like having to live down a parentally-inflicted bobbo.the.cute@gmail.com as you enter professional life.
Google's Family Link has some specific requirements you would do
well to keep in mind. Particularly, that you need an Android device
for your child which runs Android 6 or 7
(Marshmallow or Nougat in Google's increasingly-annoying
versioning nomenclature), with a very small list of v5
(Lollipop!) devices also being compatible. Go hop on your
favorite Android shopping portal and take a look at the devices that
run 6 and 7. You may not be pleased at the prices
(see Update below for further discussion). At least as of right now,
these are decidedly not the hand-me-down phones and tablets I'd expect
most parents to pass off to their under-13 children. Give it a few years
and we'll be ok, but for now, Family Link is only for those families
which can afford a several-hundred-dollar
hundred-dollar-plus device for young Bobbo the Cute.
The insistence on the device running Android also means that kids are incapable of experiencing the internet as much of the adult world does: as a mixture of mobile and desktop interfaces. At least, as regards Google's services. Now that we have the account set up on my tablet (a non-ideal solution, since the son and I may well have conflicting schedules of use), Gmail and other things are available. But only on the tablet. If you try to browse to gmail.com on any browser except the one on that particular tablet, you get the inscrutable error message which appears above.
Finally, the Actual Answer
So, to answer the question you probably came here to find answers for: the "Looks like your Google Account can't go here" error is more or less what's printed on the tin: you're using an account that's limited in some way, and according to Google's rules, the limitation prevents you from going to the place you're trying to go.
If you're using a Family Link account (internet searches suggest that this is the main way to get this error right now), go back and find a (very expensive) recent Android device and either do a factory reset on it, or create a new user (usually buried deep inside the Settings app on a phone or tablet), and follow the directions on the Family Link app on your own phone. Log in with the child's new account (Google's overuse of the word "kid" was jarring after the second instance -- a kid is a baby goat, and will never be a particularly respectful term for a young human) on your Expensive New Device That You Wouldn't Normally Hand to a Child (ENDTYWNHC), and it should Just Work.
Keep in mind that the only way to access those Google account services is via that one ENDTYWNHC, and you'll be golden. Forget it at home and need to check your child's email? Tough. Google's compromise account for children is sufficiently limited that you might be better off just fibbing on their age and getting them a normal Gmail account with some other, more flexible parental control software.
Update to the Original Post
September 15 Update: I was wrong about the versions of Android that support Family Link: it's only v7 (Nougat) devices that all support it, with a small number of v6 (Marshmallow) devices on a list. There's no support of any v5 devices, which I had incorrectly said above.
The market for inexpensive Nougat devices isn't quite as dire as I'd seen on my first glance -- we were able to find a $130 Acer 10" tablet that will do the job well, and paired with a $30 keyboard case, it'll very nearly look like a laptop. That's still a lot of money to spend on something to hand to a typical young human, but at least it's (just) under $200.
We were also pleasantly surprised to find that any number of devices could apparently be set up using the restricted child's account. After all the run-around we'd been through, it would have been logical to find that there was literally only one device the account could exist on, but that was not the case.
Posted at 11:19 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater