I changed jobs in March, and my new employer uses Google Workspaces.
I’m not a massive users of Google personally, the one area I tend to use is Youtube.
Because of the above, I have to have my work Gmail and Slack on my personal phone.
Google Workspaces does this utterly idiotic thing in the name of “Security” where it kicks you out of your apps every 2 weeks with no warning. This happens on the phone and on my work Mac. You could be in the middle of working on a document or presenting and it just KICKS YOU OUT. AAAAAARGH. I’m guessing your Authorisation token expires.
Putting aside that this is no more secure than asking you to change your password every two weeks (regular password changes have been bad practice for a few years now) it’s so disruptive and our IT team tell me there’s no way to extend beyond 2 weeks.
But back to my phone. This means that regularly when I go to YouTube it’s connected to my Work account when I want to use my personal account and I have to login to my personal account again. Google gets to (in their back end) connect the two accounts together as the same person and I get even more pissed off. And because - well google - I can’t have them (gmail and youtube) perma logged into different accounts.
Screw the interconnected world, I want my 8086 processor back
This was so much better at my old employer who used Microsoft exclusively.
I had a similar problem when I was part of an organization that used Microsoft’s services. I had my personal account, and my organization account - and Microsoft told me it would be fine if I used the same email address for both.
Microsoft couldn’t seem to keep straight which account was which. So I wound up having to change my password all the time due to the organization’s policy, and I was always logged in to the wrong account. So half the time when I went to change my “business” password, the password got changed on my personal account.
it was a mess.
Facebook Messenger (a necessary evil for me) has started doing the same sort of thing as your Google scenario. All of a sudden, mid-conversation, it decides that I need to re-enter my PIN. And on the screen, it helpfully notes that they’re doing this for no other reason than that they want me to remember my PIN, so they feel they need to make me enter it periodically.
I have it in my 1Password, but it’s maddening that I’d have to go look it up in the middle of a conversation.
I have a similar situation (Google Workspace business account and a personal one on the same phone), but it works better, at least for me;)
Logging out of the apps: it happens, but definitely less often than every two weeks. I’ve noticed that it probably depends on how often the app is used. My colleague who works part-time and uses Gmail less frequently has to log back in more often. I use email every single day—re-logging in happens maybe once every 1-2 months.
YouTube and two accounts: I don’t have any problems with this. I have Gmail and YouTube apps on my phone. Both of them show both logged-in accounts (business and personal), but both also remember which account I’m using. So, if I only use YouTube with my personal account, it never automatically switches to the work account.
One company I worked at had an expiry of 24 hours for Microsoft.
Every day, every app I had to login. Absolutely ridiculous and probably cost them a fortune in lost productivity.
I’m pretty tight with the IT team and don’t believe that they’ve fobbed me off yet in more than 4 months. They value the backup I provide them in a number of point,
I’m not the first person to complain to them about this and it’s been mentioned in our IT Help Slack channel a few times before I joined. They’d get far less grief if they could, and did, extend the timeline on it.
I use Google on my Mac every single work day (except holidays) and it still kicks me out of Workspace and also Slack every 2 weeks whether I like it or not. I don’t think it’s based on how often you use it.
AFAIK a GW admin could prevent you from logging into free google services if you were using a Chromebook or a managed iPhone, etc. But not on your personal phone.
FWIW, I stay logged into both my free Gmail account and my Google Workspace email account in Gmail.app. And logged into my personal YouTube premium account. And have never had any problems.
I have been using Google Workspace for my business for over 15 years, and I also have a personal Gmail account. On the web, I just created Profiles which allow me to cycle to which ever account I want.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, if I go a while (7-10 days) without using the open apps or tabs, it will ask for reauthorization. Otherwise I never have had this problem.
And on the iPhone and iPad I have never had a problem. I should note that on mobile, I am using the Google apps, not accessing thru a browser.
What you are experiencing sounds strange and I would have to agree that it is probably a setting somewhere in Admin Panel
Just checked my organization’s Google Workspace session expiration and it’s set to 14 days, but can be set shorter or longer to 30 days or to never expire.
Slack enterprise also allows for setting session expiration times - we currently have it set to 28 days for desktop and never for mobile. Here’s the link to the relevant doc:
As others have said the Admin can change this. It’s one of the reasons I switched to a Google phone and use Chrome. I have no real issues now. I use profiles and change the colour of each profile in Chrome. On my Pixel I’m running 5 different gmail/google accounts and switching is dead easy.
As always, it’s the difficulty of using a different eco system to the one your device is running, but having been there I feel your pain.
