While reviewing the Lumia 930, I found myself factory resetting it several times on day one. And not because of anything wrong with the phone or its software. You see, there's a limit built into the Microsoft account and Store system that just hasn't been thought through completely. It only hurts the people Microsoft and the Windows Phone team should be wanting to make friends with!

Here's what happened, roughly in sequence:

1. I sign into my Microsoft account on the Lumia 930, as usual. Data and contacts, and so on, all start to flow in.
     
2. I go into the Store application. Looks like there are updates to grab, as you'd expect, new versions of applications released since the device was created in the factory. 
    
3. I start getting errors: 'Attention required: tap here', and then 'You're already using your Microsoft account on the maximum number of devices. Sign in at windowsphone.com to see the phones allowed for this account'. 
    
4. Slightly frustrated, I go to windowsphone.com on the web (on a desktop) and sign in. Under my account, in a slightly unintuitive display it seems as though I have around ten smartphones listed. "OK", I think, "maybe there's a limit of 10 phones per account, I'll remove a couple."
    
5. I remove two, then three, then four phones from the account (each time getting more and more annoyed that this particular phone being removed would no longer be much use in covering app updates, etc.), trying after each one to see if the error goes from the new Lumia 930. No dice. "Eh?"
    
6. I decide to speak to someone in Support on windowsphone.com - luckily they have an IM chat facility. The wait time was only a couple of minutes and soon I was chatting to a representative. 
    
7. 'Ah, no', the guy says, you're only allowed to have 5 phones on a Microsoft Store account. "But I've been using 10 up until today!" I protest. 'Well, your good luck if it let you!', he says, 'But the limit should be 5'.
    
8. I ask him to confirm with a supervisor. He does and comes back to affirm '5' again. And, still trying the 930 with five other phones listed, reality does seem to have caught up with the rule.
    
9. I can't lop off any more of my test phones - this is starting to affect my work here, as a reviewer and Microsoft-covering journalist. I ask the Support guy what I should do and he says 'Make a second account and use that. That's what we do when testing phones and apps here at Microsoft - we each have many different accounts with very similar names and email addresses'!
    
10. Having lost the will to live in exasperation, I say goodbye and dutifuly create a second account with a number added after my real one, etc. What a farce! 

Typical symptoms - problems downloading and updating, then the dreaded error message...

Now, despite the ridiculous outcome, I do have a little sympathy for Microsoft here. The danger scenario (in Microsoft's eyes) is that a user signs in on lots of phones, buys content/apps once and then downloads on all the devices. Which, theoretically, could be used by his friends.

In practice, in both the Apple and Google universes, with iOS and Android devices, a single account with no device limits is used and there are, in the real world, no serious piracy issues whatsoever. A phone is a personal device and the last thing anyone would want to do is be signed into an app store on someone else's device - what might they do with it, etc? 

Microsoft is, as usual, being far too paranoid here. I can understand there being a device limit per account - say 30 or 50, to stop something getting truly out of control in the hands of a club or company which played fast and loose with Windows ids. But the problem here is that normal users are accommodated fine with the tiny limit of '5'. Most of them will do well to get through 5 Windows Phones in a few years, let alone concurrently. The same is not true for journalists, reviewers, bloggers and geeks generally.

I routinely (as above) have (or at least had!) up to 10 Windows Phones all signed in, updating, using them with different application sets to check for updates and try things out. I'm sure the same applies to many others in the categories above. Yet Microsoft's paranoia over piracy has led to the crazy situation where the rules are only catching out the people who are most likely to write about Windows Phone, to enthuse about it, to evangelise it!

Is there an easy answer? Of course there is - raise the limit. It would take one change in one settings file on Microsoft's servers.

But, assuming that Microsoft's paranoid nature is what it is (sigh), is there an answer that leaves the limit in place for the majority? I'd argue that it would be quite simple for Microsoft Support to flag, on request, certain accounts as belonging to the aforementioned journalists and bloggers and, if approved, that the accounts would have the device limit raised to, say, 50. Heck, the system could be used by Microsoft internally, for testing apps and devices and stopping them having to waste time jumping through hoops with multiple accounts.

But, until Microsoft joins Apple and Google in trusting its users a little more, as a writer for All About Windows Phone, I'll remain steve.litchfield@live.com... and two or three others besides, with arbitrary numbers tacked in the middle...