Connecting an Android Phone to 2 Google Accounts

If you’ve got an Android phone, and you want to get your contacts, email and calendar from two Google accounts (e.g. work and home) it’s possible but a bit clunky.

Set up the phone with the Google account you want to use most, this will be the account that the phone’s built-in Google apps will use. Note that if you change your mind about which account this should be you’ll need to reset you phone and so lose all your settings.

For the other account, add an Exchange/ActiveSync account for the server m.google.com (as if you were using Windows Mobile, as shown here) and set it to sync calendar and contacts (not email because Google sync currently support it). To pick up email, add an imap account as shown here.

Now your contacts and calendar entries that came from the main Google account will show up as from “Google” and the items from the second account will show up as “Exchange”.

Not perfect, but it works OK. Now I just need to figure out how to stop it from listing all the ActiveSync’d contacts in “lastname, firstname” format.

Also note that either of these Google accounts can be Google Apps For Your Domain (gafyd) accounts if imap and sync are enabled by your domain administrator.