Installed apps not showing in Android Market My Apps screen?

Something weird happened to my normally rock solid LG Optimus V this week. My installed apps disappeared from the My Apps screen in the phone's Android Market app. Update notifications were being shown in the Notifications tray, but when I tapped on the notification, all I saw was a list of pre-installed apps like GMail, Google Maps and YouTube. The only recent new software was that the phone had recently updated its Android Market app.

Weird huh?

I started searching online to see if others had experienced something similar, and it turns out there are way too many people out there who have had I-would-never-want-to-go-through-that experiences with the Android Market app. None of them matched my situation so I'm adding the solution for my issue here, and fortunately mine was actually really simple.

Somehow, possibly when the latest Android Market app update installed itself, the primary Market Google account on my phone got flipped around. It's one of those set once and never touch settings. Instead of looking at my normal Android Market purchasing account, the phone was looking at purchases for another Google account on the phone - which had made no app purchases. So the Android internals were detecting updates for my installed apps and the Android Market showed nothing. Makes sense...if you're the kind of person who digs under the surface to troubleshoot these things! If you're not, it would probably just be one of those mysteries for a long, long time!

All I needed to do to get things back to normal was open the Android Market app, push the Menu button, choose Accounts and set the phone's primary Android Market account to the correct one again. I hope this helps anyone who might be experiencing a similar issue!

Why do I use the LG Optimus V, given that it's far from the state of the art? Simple. It's one of the Android phones that works really, really well. No frills, no slowdowns after a few months and it runs stock Android for the most part. It's rock solid. They just need to make me one as reliable but with a 4 inch screen, also running stock Android. I think that's called the "Nexus S on T-Mobile's new no annual contract plans", but that's a subject for another post...