Users can't download several of my Android apps at the same time

Kelsonk

I've had this problem for years, but was never too concerned with it because I only have one popular app, the rest were less so. But whenever users try to install several of my games to their device, it results in some kind of error preventing them from doing so. That's really all the info I have, any ideas? I thought maybe I couldn't use the same signature for all my apps, but after doing some reading that doesn't seem to be the case. So I figure it must be something in my application xml? I have a separate xml for each of my apps, but there was a lot of copying and pasting going on. Of course things like the id were set differently for each app.

joshtynjala

As long as your apps have different ids, that should be what differentiates them.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/32.0">
	<id>com.example.this.must.be.unique</id>

Do you know what the error is?

ma

Could be an issue in the manifest additions, two apps with providers having the same authority cannot be installed simultaneously. Send me your app xml 's and I'll have a look for you?

2jfw

ma Can you please elaborate on this a bit more, out of curiosity?

ma

Sure, so some SDKs implement a provider to do some initialisation or serve content for your application, eg Firebase uses one to do initialisation:

<provider
    android:name="com.google.firebase.provider.FirebaseInitProvider"
    android:authorities="APPLICATION_PACKAGE.firebaseinitprovider"
    android:exported="false"
    android:initOrder="100" />

These providers are like mini applications contained within your app and must have a unique authority to identify them. (Note the APPLICATION_PACKAGE reference here which would use your application package name (app id) to uniquely identifier this provider.)

If you don't change this reference correctly in your manifest, then you may have two applications (completely functional on their own), that cant be installed together due to the clash of provider authorities.

2jfw

ma Thanks Michael, much appreciated!