How to add a Google email account to your Android email app without linking it to the phone’s account manager

Spoiler for those who don’t want technical or long details:

If you’re trying to add a Google email account on your Android device and your email app keeps redirecting you to the Android account management screen instead of letting you add it directly, here’s the solution: Install an alternative browser (like Brave), go to your Android settings, search for “Default Browser App,” switch it from Google Chrome to Brave, then go back to your email app and add the new account. Once you’re done, if you prefer using Chrome as your default browser, you can switch back in the same settings.

For those interested in the longer story:

Today, I tried to add a new email account to my Spark client on my Android phone, but no matter what I did, every time I selected the option to add a Google account (even manually configuring IMAP and SMTP settings), it redirected me to my phone’s account management screen, asking me to add the account to Android itself.

I find it incredibly frustrating that things are being grouped together when they really shouldn’t be! After banging my head against the wall for a while and trying different email apps like K-9 and AquaMail, I realized the issue wasn’t the email app, but something that had changed elsewhere.

Eventually, I figured it out: the culprit was the new version of Google Chrome! Since authentication now relies on OAuth/2 (which is a good thing), the whole authentication process involves generating a token provided by Google services, which is handled via an embedded browser instance. Starting with a recent update, Google decided that authentication requests through embedded browsers should no longer be handled independently of the operating system but must involve the OS’s account management.

So, if you want to add a new email account, you also have to add that account to your phone as an alternative system account. What a mess!

The solution, as mentioned above, is simple: change the default browser from Chrome to any other browser (like Brave), add the Google account to your email app, and then switch the default browser back to Chrome. Ridiculous!