Being Forced to Repurchase Apps after Upgrade to new WP8 Phone

[TheArcaneFlame]

Update / Resolution

After several very frustrating hours of troubleshooting both on my own and with MS Support we were able to get the problem fixed. Even though you are allowed to have more than one phone on a Live Account that seemed to be the root cause of the issues in my case. Once I removed my Trophy from the account and gave it a few minutes to propagate those changes the store started behaving normally again on both the Lumia 822 and through the web. Very frustrating to deal with but the end result is what matters and the new phone is working as expected now. Also, I am getting refunds for the couple apps that were purchased twice.


Original Problem

So I have been a WP7 user for years... Got the Trophy on Verizon as soon as it was available and I actually love that phone but I decided to upgrade to a Nokia Lumia 822 to hold me over until a new flagship phone (928?) was released on Verizon. I'll be clear here... I'm a huge advocate of MS and their products... I've gotten us to standardize on Windows Phone at work and we have only 1 or 2 android devices remaining, I have us deploying both Pro and RT Surface Tablets throughout the organization, We're already exploring moving to Windows 8. I'm always selling people on the platform and getting them to convert... so I was excited to upgrade to WP8 myself to get access to newer apps/features and whatnot....

Well I get the brand new 822, activate it on my account, add my Live ID and go about setting everything back up... All is well until I get to installing Apps. I start out and everything is going smoothly apps are installing fine but then all of a sudden it starts asking me to purchase apps that I already own. WTF?! It was working fine telling me that I had already purchased apps and giving the option to reinstall as is expected. Then out of the blue it's like it has no idea what my purchase history is and starts prompting with my credit card info to actually re-purchase apps. (the CC info is being filled in automatically so it clearly knows who I am and is seeing my account correctly) So the WPCentral app for example, it wants me to buy again... Whatever, I decide to just pony up the $0.99 because I figured it was a version thing or a fluke at that time and what's 99 cents? Well then it becomes clear that it was doing that for pretty much everything moving forward!

Ok, so that's annoying but I figure I'll do some troubleshooting so I start working through my Microsoft Account and realize that it's still showing my Trophy as the only phone on the account and there with no mention of the 822... Eventually I get the 822 to show up so I figure, that will fix it... no dice. However, I can get it to work if I go through the online purchase history and send the apps directly to the phone. So that works for a few games but then I run into another problem because the stupid purchase history only goes back so far and I don't see half the apps/games I've bought over the years. The ones that aren't on the list it of course wants me to purchase them again. So then I tried accessing the apps through the web store and again it wants me to buy them. And again... WTF?! The problem seems to be especially apparent with the Xbox Live Games I had purchased... none of those would reinstall without asking to be purchased. I have them right there on my Trophy, I can see them... I know that I bought them but I cannot install them on my new phone aside from the ones that actually showed up in the purchase history. Why the **** doesn't the purchase history show everything that you have ever bought?! Pretty pissed right now.

Anyone have any advice? Has anyone run into this before? I'm probably going to have to try and contact MS Support to try and resolve this.

 

[Zomby Jeezus]

Arcane, It kills me to read your story. I have a trophy too... I guess i shouldn't expect ms to give me the games i have already purchased! ******* bull***t. Why would they risk the ecosystem pissing off their already small mobile customers compared to the whole pie by making it difficult for the people who already love and SUPPORT their products. Unreal. I really hope that "when" they release this "supposed" 928 and that when i buy it, i don't have these issues.

 

[TheArcaneFlame]

Zomby Jeezus, just to follow up and clarify.... You DO get all the games/apps that you already purchased without needing to repurchase them. What happened for me was a (hopefully) one off problem and it got all straightened out eventually. As per my update above, for some reason having both phones on the Microsoft account was messing up the Windows Phone Store. Once my old phone was removed from my Microsoft account everything worked as expected and I was able to reinstall all my old games and apps onto the new Lumia 822 as expected without having to repurchase them.. So while it was a pain-in-the-*** to deal with and troubleshoot, I'm still just as big of a Microsoft/Windows/Windows Phone fan as I was before and even though I loved my Trophy and never had any problems with it, I like my new 822 even better. Everything else went smoothly. I wouldn't worry to much about it but hopefully whenever you upgrade it will be a smooth process from start to finish!

So far, the only thing I miss is the ability to tether for free with the 822 as I could with the Trophy. I really do not want to (and will not) pay $30 a month for that hotspot feature but I also don't want to give up my unlimited data. Between a rock and a hard place with that...

On the other hand, the nice thing is that since I bought the 822 off contract through eBay, I still have a phone upgrade available to use on a new device should I eventually decide to move to a tiered plan so I can use the tethering.

 

[mi2n]

And how exactly did you remove your older device from your live/MS account? Facing identical issue after upgrading to Lumia 720 from a WP7 device.

Thanks.