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I have a Windows 11 laptop with Firefox installed as my primary web browser, and Brave as backup. I logged into a company Google account on my Android 12 phone, adding it as a Google Account under the Accounts settings page, and that worked just fine. I opened a mobile web browser (Firefox for Android), navigated to Google.com, and signed in, and that worked just fine.

On my laptop, however, when I try to log in to Google.com using the exact same email/password combo, it returns an incorrect password error, exactly as if I'd just entered the password wrong. (Friends, I guarantee I did not enter the password wrong. I had several different colleagues verify that both the username and password were identical to the ones I used to log in on mobile.)

This issue persists regardless of whether I use Firefox or Brave, Private/Incognito mode or regular, extensions enabled or not. I even tried deleting my PC's etc/hosts file in case that was causing a problem, but to no avail. The laptop and mobile are on the same wifi network. I tried doing "forgot password" on the laptop, but it gave me an error, saying to contact my org admin, so no luck there.

Does anyone know what's going on?

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  • Follow the advice that you already got... contact your org admin. This because your admin might have to authorize your laptop, might have to submit a support ticket directly to Google among other posibilities.
    – Rubén - Volunteer Moderator - ♦
    Commented Apr 19, 2022 at 23:16
  • @Rubén that advice was for changing my password, which I don't need to do. Why would the admin have to authorize a laptop, but not a mobile device? If it's a user-agent string, that's easy enough to spoof...
    – ETL
    Commented Apr 20, 2022 at 3:18
  • Regardeless that you get that advice when trying to change the password, as this issue occurs in a Google Workspace account and this service allows admins, among many things, restrict what devices might allowed to use company accounts (ref. support.google.com/a/answer/1734200), IMHO you should contact your org admin. Anyway, lets put this aside for a while... please add more details... are you able to use a gmail.com account on your laptop? try using Chrome instead of Firefox, if Chrome works, add the Firefox and Brave versions. P.S. Troubleshooting like questions are off-topic here.
    – Rubén - Volunteer Moderator - ♦
    Commented Apr 20, 2022 at 3:58
  • Turns out the simplest solutions are often, well, the simplest. UA string solved it immediately, Feel free to upvote the answer posted.
    – ETL
    Commented Apr 20, 2022 at 4:08

1 Answer 1

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Changing the user-agent string to one that corresponds to a mobile OS* solved this issue. It appears that for whatever reason, Google did not want to allow a desktop device to log in. (This could be a specific setting in the Google Apps Admin Panel, so that users can only sign in on mobile devices, although it's not a setting that I've ever heard of.)

*for example, Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 11; Pixel 5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.91 Mobile Safari/537.36

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