Android INSTALL_FAILED_UID_CHANGED

Question

I have been doing debugging on Android using my Nexus 4, however I recently encountered this error here. After doing some research on this error, it seems to be an issue wit

Answer 1

Thought I'd share this in case it helps someone... I wrote a new version of my app in eclipse and tried to run it on my phone despite having a slightly older version on the phone that I downloaded from Google Play store. Eclipse popped up a dialog asking if I was happy to uninstall the existing on-phone version and I agreed. The uninstall was defective and led to INSTALL_FAILED_UID_CHANGED.

I tried most of the things suggested here with no luck. There was no apparent trace of the APK on my phone, or any data files I could find to delete, but something was preventing me from loading the APK onto the phone from eclipse. I also could not download my previous beta-testing version from Google Play - the download proceeded to 100% but then failed with a message reporting "unknown error", and a number (probably -24).

I was hesitant to rename my package because I already have beta testers and in-app products set up with the old package name, but I changed the package name in eclipse temporarily and I was able to install that new version onto the phone and then download the older Google Play version as well. Both versions sat happily beside each other on the phone with the same app name and icon (but different package names behind the scenes). I could then manually uninstall either or both by dragging the app icon to the uninstall icon of the phone. The manual uninstall removed the conflict and repaired eclipse's defective uninstall, so I simply renamed my eclipse package to the original name and carried on as before.

This was much less painful than a factory reset or permanent package rename. It probably only works when the source of the error is a conflict between an eclipse version and a Google Play version, but it is worth a try if you are in a similar situation.