Installation error: INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES

Question

At the risk of repeating what appears to be a very common complaint, I think I have a substantial variation on this bug.

The application won't install from Eclipse and this appears in the console: Installation error: INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES.

LogCat provides some illumination: Package com.xxx has no certificates at entry assets/fonts/helvetica_neue.ttf; ignoring!

Meaning that the device (or emulator) believes that this particular file wasn't signed.

The usual solutions proposed for this are:
- Rename the offending file. We've tried that, it then complains about the next file, then the next, and so on.
- Add a dummy file. Tried that too. It complains about the new file, regardless of what it's called.
- Compile for greater than Android 1.6. We're compiling for 2.3.

It's worth noting this only happens when we launch a unit test. We can install the "real" application on its own with no difficulties. We're also using Maven and, of course, the Maven Android plugin.

Any insights or suggestions would be very welcome and of course if we figure it out on our own I'll post any findings.

Answer 1

I encountered this through normal debugging - while it's unlikely to help all the time, simply going to Project -> Clean and rebuilding everything may be enough to clear the error.

Answer 2

I found it was due to my JDK version. I was having this problem with 'ant' and it was due to this CAUTION mentioned in the documentation:

http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/app-signing.html#signapp

Caution: As of JDK 7, the default signing algorithim has changed, requiring you to specify the signature and digest algorithims (-sigalg and -digestalg) when you sign an APK.

I have JDK 7. I can't speak for your Maven, but it is probably the same issue. In my Ant log, I used -v for verbose and it showed

$ ant -Dadb.device.arg=-d -v release install
[signjar] Executing 'C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_03\bin\jarsigner.exe' with arguments:
[signjar] '-keystore'
[signjar] 'C:\cygwin\home\Chloe\pairfinder\release.keystore'
[signjar] '-signedjar'
[signjar] 'C:\cygwin\home\Chloe\pairfinder\bin\PairFinder-release-unaligned.apk'
[signjar] 'C:\cygwin\home\Chloe\pairfinder\bin\PairFinder-release-unsigned.apk'
[signjar] 'mykey'
 [exec]     pkg: /data/local/tmp/PairFinder-release.apk
 [exec] Failure [INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES]

I signed the JAR manually and zipaligned it, but it gave a slightly different error:

$ "$JAVA_HOME"/bin/jarsigner -sigalg MD5withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore release.keystore -signedjar bin/PairFinder-release-unaligned.apk bin/PairFinder-release-unsigned.apk mykey
$ zipalign -v -f 4 bin/PairFinder-release-unaligned.apk bin/PairFinder-release.apk
$ adb -d install -r bin/PairFinder-release.apk
        pkg: /data/local/tmp/PairFinder-release.apk
Failure [INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_INCONSISTENT_CERTIFICATES]
641 KB/s (52620 bytes in 0.080s)

I found that answered here.

How to deal with INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_INCONSISTENT_CERTIFICATES without uninstallation

I only needed to uninstall it and then it worked!

$ adb -d uninstall com.kizbit.pairfinder
Success
$ adb -d install -r bin/PairFinder-release.apk
        pkg: /data/local/tmp/PairFinder-release.apk
Success
641 KB/s (52620 bytes in 0.080s)

Now I only need modify the build.xml to use those options when signing!