How to deal with INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_INCONSISTENT

Question

I tried to reinstall an apk

$adb install -r new.apk

And it shows the error:

Failure [INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_INCONSISTENT_CERTIFICATES]

One solution is to uninstall and install the new.apk, that works fine.

But I'm wondering whether I could re-build an apk and re-install without the uninstallation. Eg. change some config in the AndroidManifest.xml, or not sign the APK, etc.

It would be great appreciated if you could tell me the whole meaning of the "INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_INCONSISTENT_CERTIFICATES".

Answer 1

For what it is worth, I ran into this problem after adding a new plugin to my Cordova project. I had been having cordova do builds and install directly on the device via USB.

I fixed it by uninstalling the app from the device and on the next deploy there were no problems.

Answer 2

It means the new copy of your application (on your development machine) was signed with a different signing key than the old copy of your application (installed on the device/emulator). For example, if this is a device, you might have put the old copy on from a different development machine (e.g., some other developer's machine). Or, the old one is signed with your production key and the new one is signed with your debug key.

Answer 3

I changed the package name while coding an update so that I could debug it on my device via Eclipse, without deleting the old version that was installed. Without reverting the package name I was using when trying to reinstall, I got this same error. Using the same package name the reinstall was successful.