Solution to INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE error on Android

Question

The INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE error is the bane of every Android developer s life  It happens regardless of app size  or how much storage is available  Rebooting the target device fixes the problem briefly  but it soon comes back  There are hundreds  if not thousands  of message board posts from people asking why the problem occurs  but the folks at Google are frustratingly silent on the issue   There is a simple workaround  If your test device is running Android 2 2 or later then add the android installLocation attribute to your application s manifest file  with the value  preferExternal   This will force the app to be installed on the device s external storage  such as a phone s SD card   For example    lt manifest xmlns android  http   schemas android com apk res android            package  com andrewsmith android darkness            android installLocation  preferExternal    This is more of a band-aid than a fix  and it may not be ideal if you want your finished app to install on the device s internal memory  But it will at least make the development process a lot less frustrating

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As this issue still exists  I thought I d add something to RacZo s answer for development purposes  If you re not using the Eclipse plugin or for whatever reason you don t have the source  but just the  apk  you can increase the partition size from the command line using the same option when you launch the emulator   emulator -avd  lt emulator name gt  -partition-size 1024   As far as I know  This option is not documented at developer android com  so I thought I d post it here so people might find this solution

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In my case failure was caused by com android providers media app  I faced this on x86 android emulator  What did I do     adb shell df Filesystem             Size   Used   Free   Blksize      data                  224M   209M    14M   4096        Too low free space on  data    adb shell du  data     409870   data data com android providers media       Almost all was consumed by single app  It s system app so I consider better not to delete it  Instead I cleaned up app data     adb shell pm clear com android providers media Success   adb shell df Filesystem             Size   Used   Free   Blksize      data                  224M     8M   215M   4096       Disk was cleared and app installed successfully

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The solution is simple   Open up the AVD Manager  Edit your AVD   Down in the hardware section  there are some properties listed with  New     and  Delete  to the right of it   Press New  Select Data Partition size  Set to  512MB   the MB is required   And you re done  if you still get issues  increase your system and cache partitions too using the same method   It s all documented right here  http   developer android com guide developing devices managing-avds html

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I didn t have root access on my phone and am unprepared for my app to be installed on the SD card  15 nbsp MB of space is available on  data  and my application is under 2 nbsp MB   For a while I got by  cleaning the Eclipse project and restarting the phone  but eventually that stopped working  probably after an update    Cleaning my application cache has solved the problem for me and doesn t require a restart of the phone or uninstallation of the app   There are applications on the market which you can use to clear the cache of multiple applications at once  Search for  clean

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I feel a bit weird writing this  but I can t be 100  sure that it s not true in some cases  it worked for me   If you had the following symptoms    You ve been working using a physical device  in my case  Samsung Galaxy Ace   You ve been developing for a couple of days straight  Your phone was connected all the time  day and night  You started getting this error after a couple of days  and it kept getting worse  None of the other answers worked for you  You re as resigned as I was      Then  try this    Unplug your phone when you re not working    I unplugged my phone and let it rest for ENTIRE DAY  My battery wore off a little  After this  I reconnected it and started debugging again  Everything worked fine this time  And I mean really REALLY fine  just as before   Is it possible that this error might be due to some battery-related hardware stuff  It still feels weird thinking this way  but now I keep disconnecting my phone every now and then  and for the night  and the problem didn t return

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Make sure you don t connect your android device with usb while trying to run the emulator

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I ended up uninstalling the app from the device and then re-installing it back in Eclipse  This is a problem I get all the time on my device from regular use  but today I got that message from development

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I came across the same error when I tried to batch install about 50 apps in the SD card directory using the ADB shell after a full ROM update   for x in   apk  do pm install -r  x  done   Some of them installed  but many failed with the error INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE  All the failed apps had space in their name  I batch renamed them and tried again  It all worked this time  I did not do reboot or anything  May be this is not the problem you guys are facing  but this might help someone searching with the same problem as I faced

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I have solved it by including android installLocation  auto  inside  lt manifest gt  tag in AndroidManifest xml file

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I tried the following     Restarted my device Deleted previous APK Rebuild my APK Uninstall my previous copy in the device Reinstall   Check if it works the same with you

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After trying out everything else in this thread  I found out my own problem was because the path to the  apk file was too long  So I cd ed to the directory where the  apk was in and did   cd  Very Long Path To Package  adb install mypackage apk   instead of   adb install  Very Long Path To Package mypackage apk   And it worked   installed just fine   Just thought this might help someone else

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In Eclipse    Run  --  gt  Debug Configurations -- gt   Select  target   and select a preferred emulator target to launch    Then Below that   additional emulator command line options   add this      -partition-size 1024   Then CLOSE the emulator  and click the debug icon  which will launch the preferred emulator you selected      Hope it Helps

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In my case it got fixed by increasing the extended memory of eclipse  by  changing the value of -Xmx768m in eclipse ini

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Workaround   Compile as 2 1 without android installLocation  preferExternal    OK   Compile as 2 2 including android installLocation  preferExternal    This will still install on SDK version less than 8  the XML tag is ignored

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You need to increase the Android emulator s memory capacity  There are two ways for that    Right click the root of your Android Project  go to  Run As  and then go to  Run Configurations      Locate the  Android Application  node in the tree at the left  and then select your project and go to the  Target  tab on the right side of the window look down for the  Additional Emulator Command Line Options  field  sometimes you ll need to make the window larger  and finally paste  -partition-size 1024  there  Click Apply and then Run to use your emulator  Go to Eclipse s Preferences  and then select    Launch    Add    -partition-size 1024    on the    Default emulator option    field  Click    Apply    and use your emulator as usual

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I got this error today  when using my phone for testing debugging with Eclipse    My error was that I used Norwegian special character                    in the application name  When I refactored the app name  using  o  instead of       the app was installed correctly    Probably not your problem  but could be note for other people getting the same error

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Thanks for posting this question  I have some additional insights that may help some developers   I am debugging my application on a device  not the emulator   The device has 21 nbsp MB free on  data  as revealed by  df  when doing  adb shell   and my app is only 5 nbsp MB  However  I did find that if I deleted other apps on the device  without rebooting the phone or restarting adbd   INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE would go away for a while and then come back   So it seems that debugging my 5 nbsp MB app requires more like 20 nbsp MB of space in  data  and in addition something was leaking each time I debugged my app   So I did  adb shell  and listed the ENTIRE  data directory with  cd  data ls -a -l -R   And I looked at the 5000-line output to see where all the space was going   I discovered vast quantities of wasted space on my device in the  data klog directory in the form of old log files from months-old debugging sessions   These were not my log files  they were created by some part of the Android infrastructure   I deleted them and instantly saved 58 nbsp MB which was not attributed in the Settings app to any particular app  I have a small device so 58 nbsp MB is very significant  about 40     So far  I have not gotten INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE again after many runs  Let s hope that was the real issue  though the OP suggests that his device had plenty of space  but didn t say how much    Hopefully some of you will also be able to escape INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE by periodically deleting  data klog     Or  you can at least do the ls -a -l -R in  data to see where all your space is going  if indeed there is really some  hidden  space issue

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I had added an additional line to the application s manifest file  which is android installLocation  preferExternal   by using this line it forces to install the app to the external storage  see the example below     lt manifest xmlns android  http   schemas android com apk res android      package  com nasir phonegap      android installLocation  preferExternal   gt

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I too faced the same problem  and I did a  Factory data reset   and it worked fine after that

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Answering to the very first post of this topic     Symptom   Some app don t install  saying there is no space and in reallity there is plenty of space free on both internal and external storage     Solution  disable external installation by default   Setting external install by defaut with this   adb shell pm set-install-location 2   Makes install impossible on many apps that can t install externally  such as adblock   or so   Then the solution is   adb shell pm set-install-location 0   Or  adb shell pm set-install-location 1  0  auto  if one is full - or irrelevant     - it select the other  1  internal 2  external

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Just uninstall the application from emulator either from command line or go to settings and uninstall the application  This will stop the error from coming

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I ran into this problem with my new Nexus 4 and an APK built with Adobe AIR  I already had android installLocation  preferExternal  in my manifest  I noticed I was also calling adb install with the -s option  Install package on the shared mass storage such as sdcard   which seemed like overkill   Removing the -s flag from adb install fixed the issue for me

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This is only a temporary workaround and not a real fix   After having this happen to me and not being pleased with the current responses I went to work trying to figure it out from the AOSP source  I have found a REAL solution   Explanation  First off  a bit of  simplified  background on how Android installs and updates      The first time an app is installed          The APK file is saved as   data app  lt full package name gt -1 apk   1 apk           When the app is to be updated          The updated APK file is saved as    data app  lt full package name gt -2 apk  2 apk     The first version  1 apk  gets deleted           On our next update s           The new APK is saved as  1 apk  and  2 apk  is deleted  Repeat forever         nbsp   The issue that most of us are having happens when the application is updated  but deleting of the old APK fails  Which itself does not yet cause the update to fail  but it does cause there to be two APK files in  data app   The next time you try to update the app the system can t move its temporary file because neither  1 apk  nor  2 apk  are empty  Since File renameTo File  doesn t throw an exception but instead returns a boolean PackageManager  it doesn t have any way to tell why it returns INSTALL FAILED INSUFFICIENT STORAGE even though the failure had nothing to do with the amount of free space   Solution  Run   adb shell  pm uninstall  lt full packge name gt   adb shell  rm -rf  data app  lt full package name gt -     OR  Uninstall the app  Use your favorite method to delete BOTH       data app  lt full package name -1 apk       data app  lt full package name -2 apk   Make sure nothing else blocks future installs in a similar way  In my case I had a  data app-lib  lt full package name gt -1 directory lingering around  In this case  an install to the SD card worked  and a subsequent move to internal memory  too   Creating  data app-lib  lt full package name gt  without the -1 ending    Why other  solutions  worked   The code for installing to external storage is significantly different which does not have the same problems Uninstalling the app only deletes one version of the APK file in  data app  That s why you can reinstall it once  but not update it  The amount of free space in an emulator isn t really relevant when this bug occurs

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Emulator solution  Open your  Android directory  Usually in your home directory  Then go to avd and then open the directory that has the name of the avd you would like to change   Now edit the config ini file and add the following line or modify the following line   disk dataPartition size 1024  Where 1024 is the size you would like to use in MB  Save the file and then start your emulator with wipe user data checked  Your emulator should now have the new size

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If you are running your application on an emulator  and if this problem persists  check your notification manager  If it shows you an icon and notification about  Phone memory is full   that means you have already installed so many applications on your emulator  Uninstall several applications which you don t want currently from  Settings    Manage Application    Select Application    Uninstall   That Set  Now re-run the program

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If you re using a real device  you ve simply run out of internal memory  Just go to Android settings -  Applications  and move some apps to the SD card or uninstall some apps   If you re using the emulator  see RacZo s answer

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Samsung Galaxy Ace advertises 158 nbsp MB of internal storage in its specifications  but the core applications and services consume about 110 nbsp MB of that  I used the task manager on the device to inspect this   My app was 52 nbsp MB  because it had a lot of assets  Once I deleted some of those down to 45 nbsp MB  the app managed to install without a problem  The device was still alerting me that internal storage was almost full  and I should uninstall some apps  even though I only had one app installed   After installing a release version of the  apk bundle and then uninstalling it  my device displays 99 nbsp MB of free space  so it might be debugging information cluttering up the device after all  See Louis Semprini s answer

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I came across this question because I was getting this error using the Sideload Wonder Machine to install apps to my actual phone   I found the problem was that I had multiple  apk files in the  payload directory   I thought this was something that was supported  but when I removed all but one  apk  the error went away

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A bit time consuming  but it should work in any case    Install a file manager  like Adao Task Manager  on your phone     Connect via USB and enable USB storage  Copy the APK file from your local build to the phone  you might need to allow unknown sources under application settings     Then just tap the APK file and Android will install it  Like I said  it s time consuming  but it might be faster than rebooting every now and then

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A related issue on the emulator is when there isn y any space left in the  data partition   For example     adb shell df  Filesystem             Size   Used   Free   Blksize  dev                   252M    32K   252M   4096  mnt asec              252M     0K   252M   4096  mnt obb               252M     0K   252M   4096  system                154M   154M     0K   4096  data                   64M    57M     6M   4096  cache                  64M     1M    62M   4096   Here is a sample view of the  data app directory     adb shell ls -l  data app  -rw-r--r-- system   system      19949 2011-10-12 17 09 CubeLiveWallpapers apk -rw-r--r-- system   system      27670 2011-10-12 17 09 GestureBuilder apk -rw-r--r-- system   system      34341 2011-10-12 17 09 SoftKeyboard apk -rw-r--r-- system   system      20151 2011-10-12 17 09 WidgetPreview apk   I removed the extra APK files  It seems upon every install you get a new APK file  Just remove the extra APK files   For example   adb shell rm  data app com brooklynmarathon calendarapi2-1 apk

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The following helps    Open a shell to the device  adb shell  Navigate to the temp directory where the incoming APK is first copied  cd  data local tmp  List the available files and delete as desired  rm      use at your own risk  good practice to list files first    This has been reliable for me so far on an actual device     EDIT  This turned out to be not as reliable a solution as the one above   I tried a number of the solutions  Nothing really helped  Finally I found an app called SD Maid  That helped    It says the functionality is limited on unrooted devices  Mine is rooted so it would be good to see hear from people effective it is in those scenarios and if it was just a fluke that it worked for me  it is an unpredictable problem anyway    NOTE  I have nothing to do with the app  Just found it with a search

[android] Solution to INSTALL_FAILED_INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE error on Android

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