Xamarin - Android - Visual Studio - The applicatio

Question

I was working on an Android project using Xamarin in Visual Studio 2012. I recently upgraded from an HDD to a SSD so I reinstalled Windows and all of my programs.

After cloning my git repository and trying to run the application on my device, I have not been able to get it to run. I was able to start a new hello world project and I got that to run, but I can't get this project to run.

This is what the error says:

The application could not be started. Ensure that the application has been installed to the target device and has a launchable activity (MainLauncher = true).

Additionally, check Build->Configuration Manager to ensure this project is set to Deploy for this configuration.

I have searched for a solution to this issue but have been unable to find anything that worked.

Answer 1

I solved the issue. Somehow the application still existed on my device even though it did not show up in my applications and I needed to remove it.

The solution was to find an old APK that I had emailed and I installed that. Then I uninstalled the application and deployed it again from Visual Studio. This time it worked.

You can read more here: https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/8501/install-failed-update-incompatible

EDIT (March 13th, 2017):

Seems a lot of people found this answer useful so I decided I should update it with an alternate method to uninstall the app if you don't have access to an old version.

As Atul Chaudhary and Nestel mentioned, you can open up your adb command prompt and run adb uninstall <com.your.application.package.name>. If there are any remnants of your application which remain this should get rid of them.

Answer 2

The ADB approach does not worked for me. I did not want to factory reset my phone nor uninstall my apps so I have managed to deploy by changing the package.

1. Right click on your Droid project
2. Select Properties
3. Got to Application Manifest
4. Change the Package name
5. Re-deploy your project

Hope this helps

Answer 3

adb uninstall did the trick. The strange thing is that even if you run the command to list all app that are installed it will not show up but if you run the uninstall command with ur package name which should be ur project name or name that you have assigned you will get the success result which means it got uninstalled and to check that if run the uninstall command again with same package name u will get failure command. Then deploying ur package again should work

Answer 4

I could not get this working, initially. Tried removing everything (Mono runtime, app, etc.), but to no avail.

What did work was renaming my package, which was fine in my case since I haven't release my apk yet. Some ghost version is obviously still stored on my unit.

Answer 5

I had the same error today, trying to run Xamarin Android-app on Xamarin Android Player. To fix it I needed to check the "x86" box at the "Supported architectures" section. So you might want check this section.

Answer 6

I experienced this problem when there was not sufficient memory on device. After "successful" deployment the app was missing even from the app list in Settings. Deleting through adb gave me Failure which indicated it was not installed. In Output log in VS2015 I was having the same message as OP. Finally it worked after I cleaned up about 50-100 MB, even though in App Settings it showed me that there were 500 MB free. I tried different solutions (deleting through adb, cleaning, building then deploying) but only cleaning up worked.