Nativescript-cli: App fails to install in debug mode on android

[karthiksbhat]

Did you verify this is a real problem by searching Stack Overflow and the other open issues in this repo?

Yes.

Tell us about the problem

My app fails to install on my device on tns run android. iOS debugging works perfectly.

Which platform(s) does your issue occur on?

Android only.

Please provide the following version numbers that your issue occurs with:

• CLI: v3.4.0
• Cross-platform modules: v3.4.0
• Runtime(s): tns-android v3.4.0

Please tell us how to recreate the issue in as much detail as possible.

tns run android

Output:

Running full build
The project successfully built.
Installing...
Unable to apply changes on device: e0c6dec1. Error is: The parser did not find any certificates in the .apk..
[NSDebugAdapter] The tns command finished its execution with code 0.

Additional details

This was working fine with v3.2 (or v3.3) of CLI and Android. The only changes since then was updating to the latest version of NS, as well as an Android OS update (now v7.0) on my testing device. When the -debug.apk file is transferred to my device and installed manually, the installation is successful and it works normally.

The apk debug certificates are less than 365 days old.

Further (empirically), the installation is successful on the first attempt after a phone restart (after uninstallation), but live sync stops working (with above error) after about 10 iterations.

[Plamen5kov]

@karthiksbhat I', sorry to hear you have a problem running your application.
I was unable to reproduce your problem. The commands I ran were:

• tns create myapp && cd myapp
• tns platform add [email protected]
• tns run android

The apk debug certificates are less than 365 days old

The run command usually uses the debug keystore to sign your app. Did you use your own certificate?

[karthiksbhat]

@Plamen5kov Hi, I didn't use my own certificates. Since the error was something about not finding keys, I just deleted the debug.keystore file so that it would generate a new one.

I'm actually having trouble reproducing this issue across devices myself. I'm using a different test device (same phone -- Samsung Galaxy C7) with an older OS (Android v6.0.1) for the same project and I'm not facing the same problem.

[Plamen5kov]

@karthiksbhat Thank you for the details, please let us know if you find a persistent way of reproducing the issue, so we can take a deeper look into it. Thank you!

[devjosh-mudbath]

Came across this same issue today.... Any information on how to get around this?

[Fatme]

Hi @devjosh-mudbath,

I'm sorry to hear your have issues with NativeScript. Unfortunately, I was unable to reproduce it on my side.
Could you elaborate a bit more on the matter - do you reproduce it on emulator or real device, is your device Samsung? If you could provide a sample application illustrating the issue it would help a great deal with reproducing.

Also can you please try it with latest versions of nativescript and android which will be released next week?

npm i -g nativescript@rc
rm -rf platforms
tns platform add android@next

[devjosh-mudbath]

Hey @Fatme , I have managed to solve the issue for me. It looks like its because I had performed little clean up of the folders in the application in order to try and solve another issue I was having, and in the process had deleted the "hooks" folder.
Deleting the hooks folder is something I do religiously when jumping between different version of my application, however this time for whatever reason the hooks folder had not generated.

I didn notice that the tns prepare android command was silently failing (some typescript errors) which could be why it was not not creating the "hooks" folder.
After spotting the typescript error and running tns prepare again, the hooks folder came back and the error went away.

[Fatme]

Hey @devjosh-mudbath,

I'm really happy to hear you resolved your issue.

@karthiksbhat have you managed to resolve your issue?

[karthiksbhat]

@Fatme I actually haven't, but I think it's something to do with my device more than something else? I haven't had a similar problem with any other test device I'm using...
My issue isn't with tns prepare android failing, I think, because the same process works on other devices.

[Fatme]

Hi @karthiksbhat,

I'm also suspecting it's some local setup. But this kind of problems are very hard to investigate and to figure out.

My suggestion is to update to latest versions of nativescript and android which will be released this week and check if the error is still reproduced.

npm install -g nativescrip@rc
rm -rf platforms
tns platform add android@next

[rosen-vladimirov]

As this issue is quite old and it seems there are no steps to reproduce the error, I'm closing it. In case you face the same problem and the suggested workarounds do not help, please open a new issue and reference this one in it.