Hey guys and gals, in our house there are several droid phones and tablets all with their own gmail

having bought (yes bought) several games for each i got to thinking why am i buying them for only i device when we have several

do the people out there with more than 1 device, like me, use the same gmail on all devices so you only buy an app the once or is there some legal thing out there that deters this practice

having bought minecraft 3 times now im rather cheesed off with it all. i put 2 accounts onto 1 old phone to test this out and it works ok but i dont fancy falling fall of the law and getting our phones blocked or something daft like that

i thought about making a gmail just for all the devices to share so we can keep our emails separate, any thoughts?

no, one account does it all. I have two phones, and two tablets. same apps on the same account

You may use the same store account for you personally across 5 devices. Sharing apps between accounts or people is strictly against the terms of service. However if you and your partner for instance were to both use the same Gmail account, well, who's gonna know? Its technically not allowed but they can't tell and won't likely pursue it either.

ok guys thanks, i hoped this would be the answer

ill make a shared gmail for them all for future purchases

My wife and son both got droids for Christmas. I set up one google play account and from a internet browser can send the same app to both.

Found another alternative yesterday. Get the free app "ES file explorer". Open it and it will show a nice my documents style interface of your SD card contents. Near the top is a button that says "AppMgr". Find an app in the list, press and hold on the icon for it and select "backup" in the menu. It copies it to a folder on your SD or internal storage which can then be emailed or bluetoothed or whatever to the other device. On the other device open the settings screen, go to security, there is a setting about allowing 3rd party apps, male sire it is enabled. Once it is on that device use a file browser (ES will do the trick nicely again) to navigate to the downloaded app.apk, tap it, it will prompt for install, sorted.

This is not technically legal.

This does not work on DRM'ed apps, hit and miss what will or won't work with paid content.

It will work on free apps fine though so you could save download time by downloading am app on one device and connecting both devices to a computer via USB and copying it etc, handy if you are on a data cap maybe.

It also works on devices that donts have the google play store such as my brothers new kindle fire.

Failing that. Es file explorer is frankly an excellent app. Highly recommended. It cam be used as a client for several cloud storage providers (tested with google drive personally) and FTP servers aswell as network shared hard drives. Or you could use the backup facility for backing up apps rather than being a cheeky bigger and copying them.