Pm install -r failing (Android device)

#1

We want to be able to upgrade our apk on our Android device when we start appium.

Doing this manually, I would use "adb install -r ". I notice Lookout uses adb pm install -r . There appears to be some behavior differences for these two commands – notice this output:

wosser$ adb shell pm install -r ~/builds/my.apk
pkg: /Users/wosser/builds/my.apk
Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_INVALID_URI]

wosser$ adb install -r !$
adb install -r ~/builds/my.apk
2917 KB/s (8173856 bytes in 2.736s)
pkg: /data/local/tmp/my.apk
Success

I’ve seen some oddness in the past with Android, for example, “adb logcat” and “adb shell logcat” do not behave the same on all devices. I wonder if anyone knows anything about this behavior for Android. I also wonder if there is any reason “shell pm install -r” was chosen instead of “install -r”.

#2

install -r spends a considerable amount of time pushing the apk to the device. pm install will install an on device apk. If pm install fails then that’s a bug and I recommend opening an issue on GitHub.

#3

this wouldn’t ever happen in appium because we push the apk on device and then issue pm install using the on device path and a hash of the apk.

#4

I only ran it manually because this is the error that I get when I run this through Appium and I wanted to isolate this from Appium itself. I’ll run this test later and post the server logs.

#5

Ok, make sure to do that as an issue on GitHub. The devs won’t see the bug here.

#6

Sure enough, when I tried this again, the problem did not manifest itself. I’ll keep an eye out for the failure and grab the server logs next time it happens.