[Q] Titanium Backup and Market Links - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

OK, I screwed something up and now I cannot find a way to fix nor have i found anyone who has done what I have done. So here is an interesting question/challenge. First, the back story.
I never knew that the old market (before Play) could potentially authenticate you as a different user if you have multiple gmail accounts on your phone. So, one day while in the market, I was shocked to see a ton of my applications missing from the "My Aps" list. I did not notice that it was not logged in to the market with my default user account but instead another gmail account I have on the phone.
I researched a little, very little. I knoew about the market tools in titanium backup and thought I could get them back with the option that allows you to create market links for apps that were missing them. In the back of my mind, I figured if I didn't get an app from the market, it wouldn't create the link (or if the app doesn't exist in the market). Anyway, I chose the optin to create market links for all my apps in order to fix this issue.
Then I realized I was in th market with the wrong account so I changed it back to my default account and all my apps are showing up just fine.
Here is my problem: Any paid apps I side loaded from Amazon App Store and GetJar for free now have market links. The apps won't update from the market. I get an error -"Download denied because you did not purchase this app" - On my phone the app shows up in my apps list as purchased - it does not show up on my apps list when I log in to the market (now play) from a PC and look at my apps list that way.
Sooooo, I go in to titanium backup and remove the market link for all the apps giving me the market error. I check my apps in the market and the apps appear to have been removed.
Great, problem should be solved but it is not. Sometimes, later in the day or maybe a day or two later, the issue starts up again. It's as if the deleted market link is getting recreated automatically somehow.
So as far as the market/play go, there is a list on internet with google that is correct as far as the apps I actually downloaded and purchased from the market AND a completely separate list kept on my phone that seems to trump the actual list on-line stored with my account.
Does anyone know a way to manually clear out my local cache of the market/play market links for good?
I even noticed after the fact that a market link now gets created for anything I side load if the same app is available in google play.
The last thing I tried was removing all market links and slowly adding them back one app at a time (for the ones I know I got from the market) but then the old sideloaded ones start getting their links again for no apparent reason.
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
-Sin

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Have you tried a factory reset?

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Factory Reset
marcos miliano said:
Have you tried a factory reset?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't want to.
Over the past few weeks (since 621 pushed to Droid Xers) I've done more factory resets and 621 sbf'ing than I ever care to do again. I lost my phone after all that and got it replaced with one from insurance that shipped to me with .605 so I just recently got root back, restored my phone with titanium backup (which seems to have restored this problem for me) got OTA rootkeeper and now I am on 621 rooted.
1. - I'm chicken. Don't want to lose root on this 621 and am afraid to factory reset it.
2. If my root is safe on 621 with a factory reset, I would have to take a full backup and use that to restore after the factory reset. This will probably end up restoring the issue again after hours of running a backup restore.
I'm a bit shell shocked over the entire 621 ordeal and am trying to find out another way to fix this issue without having to perform a factory reset and then manually installing all my apps one at a time since TTBU will probably just restore the issue again. My left eye still twitches.
I have cleared all cache as well as Davlik cache without success.
Is that the only suggestion? Is there a file I can manually edit or delete that can clear this off my phone? It is an entirely different phone than the one the issue originally popped up on. My backups seem to have preserved whatever is causing it.
-Sin
EDIT: I updated titanium backup today and came across a statement in the release notes in regards to the market doctor and links. seems Google Play is taking control over these things more on the server side and less on the device side which may or may not be crippling some of the current market link functionality in TB . At least that is how I interpreted what I read. So I went through my apps and started deleting market links again for apps I know I side loaded. So far so good. I'll report back in a week if there are no further replies or issues.
EDIT2: Seems I am not getting update notifications from the market for those side loaded apps but there is more glitchiness goodness. Almost all of my apps are showing up in the market as "not installed" but they are. Thinking I may just factory reset anyway. Just don't want to lose root although I've read I won't. Still looking for another way.
Edit3 - OK, sorry but factory wipe and reset might fix the issue and I might not lose root but I won't know what went wrong. And I need to know why this phone is glitching the way it is with the market so I dug deeper. Several things I noticed while paying attention to the phone for a long time AND viewing the logs; services were restarting over and over again. I kept getting strange JVM issue showing up in the logs and a lot of warnings and errors. I reset permissions and it changed little. Check device administrators and discovered several of my rooted apps did not have their administrator rights eneabled. So i enebaled those. I also noticed my Bakup Assistant stopped working and would not accept my PIN no matter how much verizon tried to help or how much I used google. All solutions for clearing google play data/cache and sync data/cache ended with a force close of application manager. Very messed up.
The play store was missing most of my apps when viewed from the android app but everything seemes to be there when viewing the play store from a pc. very strange. Then I discovered a little gem I hadn't known about before. In the batch jobs for titanium backup there are two interesting options. On is to clear all cache from user and system apps, the other is to clear all data from user and system apps.
I ran both jobs, cache first then data. But I did not run it on all apps. I narrowed the selection down to google play store, google framework, sync manager (or something like that) and both backup assistant apps (app + client). Yes I like to keep stock rom, Then I went in to the google play store...
Many of my apps were still missing but a bunch did show up. I used Titanium backup to destroy all market links for all user apps then I used it again to recreate them. Then I went back t the googleplay store and that is where I am now.
Almost everything is showing up for an update. So I choose to update all.
The apps I side loaded are getting errors. BUT, the google play store appears to be destroying the market links for those apps because when I go back in to the play store, they are no longer listed but remain installed on my phone. I have about 30 more apps to go through but it appears all of this has fixed the issue combined with the new play store and the way it works with apps. I'll report back again in a few days once things settle down and I'm sure the issue is resolved or not.
EDIT4: I have 12 apps remaining with this issue - going to try this app and suggestions - aytchTeeTeePee://davesdroid.blogspot.com/2012/03/android-market-issue-now-fixed-for-me.html
Probably won't be back here for a few hours, I'll let ya'll know how this turns out later.
Edit5: I lost track of which threads I was responding to, thought I put this here but had to copy paste from another thread -
Well, I ran that market fixer app twice. the first time it found 47 bad market links. Most of them look like apps that are no longer available in the market for what ever reason and the rest were some side loaded apps that don't exist in the market. so I cleared all those out.
I ran it a second time and it didn't find any bad links so i had it scan all links. i manually selected the 12 apps that were side loaded and still asking for updates in the market that it won't allow me to get. After removing those 12 links with this app, i no longer seem to have the issue. all my market apps are up to date and the proper ones are showing as installed, no more invalid market links.
I don't think this app alone fixed my issue. I found a lot of issues on my phone (read entire first reply from me above with all the edits).
The last few things I did was to remove and reinstall Launcher Pro (from the market/play store) since I don't do roms and don't like default blur. My phone is now snappier than it has ever been, seriously never ran as fast as it does now.
I've been using setcpu for a while and recently started adjusting my vm heap size but both were unstable before today. finally got the fastest vm heap size figured out (40m) also. I'm due for upgrade in may but am holding on to that upgrade until (hopefully) the galaxy Note comes to Verizon as the journal or whatever. so I'm really happy to have a my phone working again and working pretty fast also. I can't tell you how many performance issues it's had over the past few weeks that all started when i did a complete app restore from titanium backup and shortly after upgraded to .621 with OTa rootkeeper. I've had this phone for 2 years (since froyo) and have taken all OTA's and pulled all the tricks to retain or regain root so my titanium backup probably had a lot of garbage in it and restoring it to a functional phone may have screwed something up.
As much as I thought I would have had to do another wipe/factory restore, i am so glad I didn't. I've learned more about An-Droid X over the past 2 months than I have in the past 2 years of using them.

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Performance comparison
I originally wanted to post this here (h-t-t-p-://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=771232) but I haven't enough posts yet for the dev forums. After fixing my above issues and talking about how snappy my phone is, I thought I'd post some numbers that may or may not help folks understand why this was pretty exciting.
Phone properties is stock 4.5.621.MB810 rooted from .605 with OTA root keeper.
Droid X
Android 2.3.4
Running at 1GHz via SetCPU plugged in profile. Nothing disabled (not in airplane mode)
No build.prop edits with default Dalvik heap size of 32m
Linpack
Single threaded - MFlops: 4.046 Time: 20.71 Norms: 5.68 Precision: 2.22
Multi-threaded - MFlops: 10.965 Time: 15.38 Normles: 3.21 Precision: inconsistent
Quadrant Standard: 1176
After much tweaking I settled on a 40m davlik heap size (stable) and I edited my build.prop minus the screen density and button light tweaks from here h-t-t-p-://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=771232 and these are my new numbers.
Linpack
Single threaded - MFlops: 16.34 Time: 5.11 Norms: 5.68 Precision: 2.22
Multi-threaded - MFlops: 15.28 Time: 11.03 Norms: 3.24 Precision: 2.22 inconsistent
Quadrant Standard: 1763
So yeah, only a few months left with this device and it's running better than ever.
EDIT1: I forgot to mention that clearing my davlik cache and clearing the cache partition brought those 12 side loaded apps back to the market. I had to rerun the market fixer app to get rid of them again but the dev noted this in the release notes so it was to be expected.

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This is a fix for apps that have been purchased from Amazon or sideloaded and not able to purchase from Play Store
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1547134
MoPhoACTV Initiative

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Different but related?
moonzbabysh said:
This is a fix for apps that have been purchased from Amazon or sideloaded and not able to purchase from Play Store
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1547134
MoPhoACTV Initiative
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't have an issue purchasing apps from the play store. That's the strange part. Only that some of my side loaded apps were appearing in the update list on the play store. Not sure that link or the info in it has much to do with my complaint but thanks for posting it. I'll save this info for future reference if need be.
-Sin

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Sinphaltimus said:
OK, I screwed something up and now I cannot find a way to fix nor have i found anyone who has done what I have done. So here is an interesting question/challenge. First, the back story.
I never knew that the old market (before Play) could potentially authenticate you as a different user if you have multiple gmail accounts on your phone. So, one day while in the market, I was shocked to see a ton of my applications missing from the "My Aps" list. I did not notice that it was not logged in to the market with my default user account but instead another gmail account I have on the phone.
I researched a little, very little. I knoew about the market tools in titanium backup and thought I could get them back with the option that allows you to create market links for apps that were missing them. In the back of my mind, I figured if I didn't get an app from the market, it wouldn't create the link (or if the app doesn't exist in the market). Anyway, I chose the optin to create market links for all my apps in order to fix this issue.
Then I realized I was in th market with the wrong account so I changed it back to my default account and all my apps are showing up just fine.
Here is my problem: Any paid apps I side loaded from Amazon App Store and GetJar for free now have market links. The apps won't update from the market. I get an error -"Download denied because you did not purchase this app" - On my phone the app shows up in my apps list as purchased - it does not show up on my apps list when I log in to the market (now play) from a PC and look at my apps list that way.
Sooooo, I go in to titanium backup and remove the market link for all the apps giving me the market error. I check my apps in the market and the apps appear to have been removed.
Great, problem should be solved but it is not. Sometimes, later in the day or maybe a day or two later, the issue starts up again. It's as if the deleted market link is getting recreated automatically somehow.
So as far as the market/play go, there is a list on internet with google that is correct as far as the apps I actually downloaded and purchased from the market AND a completely separate list kept on my phone that seems to trump the actual list on-line stored with my account.
Does anyone know a way to manually clear out my local cache of the market/play market links for good?
I even noticed after the fact that a market link now gets created for anything I side load if the same app is available in google play.
The last thing I tried was removing all market links and slowly adding them back one app at a time (for the ones I know I got from the market) but then the old sideloaded ones start getting their links again for no apparent reason.
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
-Sin
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hi i don't know what u're experiencing is similar to what others users and myself are experiencing but i hope my solution helps.
first try using market doctor found within titanium backup itself. it seems to work for some people.
if it doesn't, which is in many cases, including mine, got to apps > google play store > clear cache, clear data and also remove updates.
it will make up phone go back to market but dun worry, it will be automatically be updated back to play store in awhile.
viola! apps all refreshed.
hit thanks if this helps!

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Nope, nada, ziltch.
xSamuraix said:
hi i don't know what u're experiencing is similar to what others users and myself are experiencing but i hope my solution helps.
first try using market doctor found within titanium backup itself. it seems to work for some people.
if it doesn't, which is in many cases, including mine, got to apps > google play store > clear cache, clear data and also remove updates.
it will make up phone go back to market but dun worry, it will be automatically be updated back to play store in awhile.
viola! apps all refreshed.
hit thanks if this helps!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nah, that never worked nor does it still. The best success I've had at holding off this issue for days at a time is an app called Market Fixer available in the play store. It seems to work for several days, then for no reason at all, the apps are back again.
My understanding is that this is a long standing issue on google's end.
-Sin