The past couple of weeks, I have been off and on working on a project to launch on the Kindle Fire.

 

My colleague posted a solution in an APK file.  So I uninstalled the app which I had on the device, transferred the APK to my device and launched it.  When it appeared to be near completion, it instead switched the message to, “An existing package by the same name with a conflicting signature is already installed”.

This blog post is about how I overcame this.

 

Now, ordinarily, I’ve been running and updating the app using eclipse.  What he had sent over was an independent APK file.

 

The method of uninstallation that I used was to touch-and-long-hold the icon for my app.  Upon lifting, the top bar came down.  Selecting the button to remove the app successfully uninstalled.  The icon was no longer on my device, and taking a look through Settings>Applications>Manage All Applications showed my app to be near the bottom of the list with a “Not Installed” indication.

Great!

Except – not great.  I cannot install the new APK file.

There are quite a number of posts about this, but most require you to do exactly what I’d already done: Uninstall.

Interesting thing is: It’s all in how you uninstall the file.

 

After much head-banging-into-wall moments, I finally tried uninstalling the more convoluted way.  First, while plugging the kindle into my computer I had my local development environment launch the app.  Going through the route of Settings>Applications>Manage All Applications, I then located my application, opened it up, cleared all cache, all app data and then hit ‘uninstall’.

This was the ticket!  Returning to the APK file, installation was successful.