I started my waze account 4 months ago. Two days ago, I updated the app. When it restarted it had me logged out. I made the mistake of hitting something on the first screen which (I think) reregistered my phone number as a new account. From everything I read, I believe this means my number is no longer associated with my original account. I don’t believe my email address was ever connected to the account either so password reset emails are not coming to me.
I know my old username, but not my password. When I set up the new account with the app, I noticed it did not even ask me for a password. My guess is that is why I have been unable to figure out the password for my old account (it is likely a random string of letters/numbers). I contacted support, but they just responded with the canned password reset instructions. None of which worked for me. No one else contacted me
Is it possible for me to recover the account or is it lost for good? If lost, that is a real shame.
I believe the main screen of the App should not make it that easy to basically put your old account in an unrecoverable state.
I am sure my account exists in the ether somewhere. My problem is:
I believe my phone number is no longer tied to the account (since the app assigned it to my new account)
I never added an email address (my fault, although this should be a requirement when you start using the app)
I believe the app assigns you a default password which you are not required to change.
All three of the above things are design flaws I believe which cause this to be a common issue. Is there anyone on here who can help me recover my orphaned account? Support does not respond with anything but canned bot replies.
Again I can switch my phone number from account to account by logging out and logging back in using a different username. The login process just asks me to verify the number each time.
If I go to Settings>Account & login and tap Log out, then I’m back at the Welcome to waze screen. I then tap “Already a Wazer?” The Already a Wazer screen lets me connect with Facebook or enter a name and password. This screen also has a forgot your password link.
Are you saying that your original account has no email linked to it and that you don’t know the password for it?
I assume my original account did not have an email address associated with it because I didn’t get any password reset emails I requested (used all possible addresses I would have linked). Additionally, I don’t seem to know the password for my original account, because I have tried every possible password I would have used and none let me log in. So yes to both your questions.
I also noticed when I made my new account it didn’t even ask for a password, but had one assigned to me. I found this strange. My guess is that I never set a password and it is just some default password (I assume the app is implemented this way for ease of use).
The more I write about this, the more I feel like this is going to be hard to be resolved.
I strongly recommend linking your email account in the settings. If you do that, you should be able to recover it easily (also make sure you know your username).
Under the app that keeps letting me login using my phone # only (on my old phone), I went under account settings in the Waze app itself and added my email address and submitted it (by clicking the check mark in upper right). This assigned an email address to the original account created with my phone # in the Waze app. On my new phone I was able to reset the pw (forgot password link) by entering the email address I just added to my account.
I changed phones and apparently accidentally created a new Waze account instead of logging in to my old one. I realized this a few months later and tried to log out and then log into my old one and could not do so.
I could not access my account in any way, even though I did set up an email address in it and have proof in my email account of receiving many emails over the years from Waze.
I suspect what happened is that in the process of working through this, I believe I accidentally set my email address on my new account to the same email that was on my old account, which somehow overwrote my email address in the Waze database, causing Waze to believe my old account did not have an email address associated with it.
Long story short, I was able to get through to Waze support and they agreed to manually credit the points from my old account to my new account, though they were unable to actually merge the accounts or grant me access to my old account. The points are nice (I had nearly a million of them), but what’s frustrating me most right now is I’m stuck at a lower level on the map editor than I was before, which is making it painfully annoying to try to fix things around my area.
Unfortunately, the Waze team seems absolutely uninterested in fixing this, and the poorly-thought-out and poorly-handled process is unfortunately emblematic of the overall thought and design the Waze developers have towards the Waze app, with numerous annoyances and UI quirks that really should have been fixed years ago, especially now that they have the resources of Google behind them. This ability to lose an account is but one of the many problems throughout Waze’s system.
Sadly, I do find myself far less engaged in the Waze community than I was before and even find myself using Waze itself much less, because I no longer feel that Google/Alphabet/Waze places any value on the free hard work and contribution of its users. I still trust the Waze algorithm over that of Google Maps for routing me around traffic, but I no longer turn Waze on during long drives to contribute GPS tracks and report errors and rack up points as I did before, nor do I evangelize Waze to others.
