Reporter, can you attach screenshots or dumps of chrome://sync-internals from both devices? +Needs-Feedback label

Assigning to gangwu@, current sync bug fixer, to look at after we get chrome://sync-internals

Closing due to inactivity.

This is chrischiesa2@gmail.com, reporter of this issue / opener of this task.  Never saw any notification of messages posted here Apr 24, only the inactivity-closing today.  Can this be reopened?   

Yeah! If this is still happening, just post your chrome://sync-internals for both devices. I'll take a look at them.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "skym@chromium.org" to the cc list and removing "Needs-Feedback" label.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Just FYI, I haven't tried syncing again since before I originally opened this thread.

I see an awful lot of data in chrome://sync-internals, on both devices.  So much, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible for me to screenshot-and-post any significant percentage.  There are multiple tabs, within which there are multiple expandable line items that open into lengthy data structures that scroll for pages and pages.  There are buttons I haven't even clicked to see what they produce.  Can you tell me any *specific* part of the data that would be most helpful, at least to start with?  

Is there a more efficient way to do this?  I see some buttons regarding dumping data to text files - - but those also bear warnings NOT TO POST the data thus produced, as "it may contain personal data."  So I'm leery.

I can tell you a few things I was able to make observations of:

1) The nature/layout/content of the chrome:://sync-internals displays are very different, between the phone and laptop, so it's hard to compare apples-to-apples.

2) On both devices, the default page is an "About" tab, with more-or-less equivalent content.

3) On the phone, the tab next to that is "Types," which displays a big table of "Type Counters", all of which are 0, for what that's worth.

4) On the "About" tab, the "Username" is different on the phone (chrischiesa2@gmail.com) than on the laptop (chrischiesa1@gmail.com).  (Note: "2" vs "1" in case that was hard to spot.)  Could this be the whole problem?  I confess to some confusion as to the concept of "logging into Chrome;" seems to me that expression really means "logging into any Google service so that Chrome becomes aware of the connection," but it's not clear how *that* works, especially if multiple different apps are constantly logging in and out of Google, possibly with different usernames.  I would think they would confuse each other.

5) Somewhere in the Windows-laptop incarnation of chrome://sync-internals, it displays data about three devices: the laptop itself, of course; my phone; and my tablet (which is not otherwise part of this conversation).  So, there's *some* mutual awareness.  But on the phone I don't even see an equivalent *place* for it to *try* to display devices it's aware of, so I can't compare.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "skym@chromium.org" to the cc list and removing "Needs-Feedback" label.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

It sounds like you've identified your problem in #4. If the accounts you've signed into Chrome between the two devices is different, we're not going to know that they're both being used by the same real person (you), and so the sync data will be completely different.

> I confess to some confusion as to the concept of "logging into Chrome;" seems to me that expression really means "logging into any Google service so that Chrome becomes aware of the connection," but it's not clear how *that* works, especially if multiple different apps are constantly logging in and out of Google, possibly with different usernames.  I would think they would confuse each other.

The way accounts work on Android is definitely confusing. You can have multiple Google accounts all signed in and tracked by Android at the same time. Within Chrome on Android, you pick an account to enable syncing through (or you can just not enable sync). Each of your apps though, should behave independently of each other, each will ask you to make a choice of which account to use (assuming they want to use a google account for something).

Closing as it seems you've figured out your problem, but again let me know if sync still doesn't work after you enable sync with the same account on both devices.