I was trying to change my default/main/startup (whatever you call it) activity by editing the androidmanifest.xml file. All i did was change the android:name property. however, this completely broke the entire app. when I try to install it fails and reads.
Installation error: INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES
When I tried to change it back to its previous state, it was still giving me the same error... What have I done?
I found this was caused by 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. 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.
Most of the time the solution for this error is really simple: