Android – Deleting The Gmail Account

[bibblebub]

I’ve had an android 4.1.2 phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) since last summer and set it up using an old gmail account. But now I’m considering deleting that account and using a new one instead, so 2 questions:-

1) If I go to the gmail website on my PC, will Google let me delete the old account while it’s still being used by an android phone, even if the phone is switched off?

2) If I can do that and do indeed delete the account will the phone just prompt me for a new gmail account or will something like a factory reset be necessary?

[Kevink]

1) Yes
2) Why not create the new account, set it up on the phone, then delete the old account?

[bibblebub]

Thanks both.

And the reason for deleting the account first - instead of me going to Android (i.e. having to find all settings where it requires the account login) I thought that I'd get Android to come to me (by having it prompt for the info when it needs it).

[bibblebub]

For the benefit of anyone with a similar question who comes across this thread looking for answers, it all went smoothly when I took action a few days ago, and what I ended up doing was:-

- created new gmail account and added that to the phone.
- switched off the phone (very probably unnecessary but I did it anyway)
- deleted old gmail account using my PC
- turned phone on and when it prompted for gmail log-in details simply removed the old account, causing it to automatically use the new one as default

The only app that then complained about the lack of gmail account was the calendar which synched with it, so simply set that to use the new one. It would have been a good idea to have moved events from the old google calendar to the new one (I use the Lightning add-on in Thunderbird so this action would have been simple) to stop them from being deleted along with the rest of the account but I forgot to do that even though I had thought about it beforehand.