In our previous app development, we were using Cordova + Crosswalk for a better webView. As of February 2017, Crosswalk is not being developed anymore. And since Android 7.0 added Chromium as their default web view, we don’t need Crosswalk anymore.
Problem
We get ride of cordova crosswalk plugin cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview and rebuild an update version (increased android:versionCode and versionName) of our current app, but it keeps showing Application Installation Failed. The error they provided us is the device already has a newer version of this application. It makes me confused since we de increased the version but why shows this error. It means we are not able to upgrade our current app to the newer version.
After few hours investigation, I found the reason and a potential solution for it.
Reason
Let’s take a look at build.gradle at module level, there’s a piece of code shows:
if (Boolean.valueOf(cdvBuildMultipleApks)) {
productFlavors {
armv7 {
versionCode defaultConfig.versionCode*10 + 2
ndk {
abiFilters "armeabi-v7a", ""
}
}
x86 {
versionCode defaultConfig.versionCode*10 + 4
ndk {
abiFilters "x86", ""
}
}
all {
ndk {
abiFilters "all", ""
}
}
}
}
The defaultConfig.versionCode comes from your android AndroidManifest.xml file which is also come from your condova’s config.xml
Such as (suppose our current version is 4.0.1):
AndroidManifest.xml: <manifest android:versionCode=“40001" …/>
Config.xml: <widget id=“xxx.xxx.xxx” version=“4.0.1" …/>
Since crosswalk provided tow different CPU architectures: armV7 and x86, when you building and compiling your project, it will call for build.gradle to reset your versionCode.
For armv7, the final versionCode should be versionCode*10 + 2, in our example, it becomes to 400012.
For x86, the final versionCode should be versionCode*10 + 4, in our example, it becomes to 400014.
When we remove Corsswalk, there’s no more architectures options when building or generating an apk, so the final versionCode is exactly what we set in AndroidManifest and config, which is 40001 in our example.
Until now we learnt that why the device already has a newer version of this application is the versionCode of the app with crosswalk always more than ten times large than the app without crosswalk.
Solution:
If you are going to update your version from 4.0.1 to 4.0.2, you have to change android:versionCode=”40002” to 40002x manually, x can be any number from 0 to 9, personally I attached 0 at the end like 400020. As long as the new versionCode is greater than the old one.
This work is licensed under a CC A-S 4.0 International License.