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I spent all day trying to figure out what is wrong with my apk. Tried ALL solutions from web, aapt revealed nothing, tried different signatures, packages, versions, browsers, OS. Manifest underwent all possible changes, yet I was getting same problem.

So I though OK, lets start from scratch, maybe google servers are down for some reason (wouldn't be the first time).

  1. created new android application project, new package, just one activity
  2. built, signed, uploaded, voila, OK, fine, removed apk from console
  3. did this few times, it succeeded every time
  4. the size of apk was few hundreds KB
  5. as my original apk was around 25MB, I thought, hey, lets try increasing size of this testing one
  6. so copied ~25MB worth of photos to drawable-hdpi
  7. built, signed, uploaded and familiar message popped out again - 'Server could not process your apk'
  8. tried several times, still same outcome
  9. deleted photos, built, signed, uploaded, ok
  10. added photos, no luck

So obviously problem is not in manifest or anything else, for some reason size matters (in this case anyway :)).

And yeah, when I deleted just 50% of photos, so apk was ~ 13MB, it sometimes worked, sometimes didn't.

Any explanation for this? Can you replicate? Have tried different browsers, operating systems, same everywhere ... I know there is a limit for apk size, but that's 50MB

Go figure ...

UPDATE: if you ever encounter same problem and you're sure your apk is fine, keep trying to upload. It worked after couple of consequent failed uploads, suddenly server COULD process, without ANY change to apk.

Kelt
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  • I don't know what the Developer Console problem might be, but just wanted to warn you that there have been reports of problems on the *user* side with *downloading* very large APKs, even when those APKs are well within the nominal 50MB limit. Specifically, some devices have a download cache with less than 50MB available, and this can cause downloads of APKs that exceed the available amount to fail. See the accepted answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4850889/people-cant-download-our-specific-product-in-android-market – Carl Jan 16 '13 at 21:34

1 Answers1

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I don't know what's going on with your app and Google Play. Our largest APK file is just under 11MB and we've never had a problem.

Perhaps you can side-step the problem by packaging up the resources in an APK expansion file, as described here. The size limit for APK expansion files is 2GB, so there shouldn't be any size issues at all. According to this thread it can be set up to work pretty smoothly (transparently for the user).

Community
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Ted Hopp
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  • Hi, thanks ... the thing I wanted to outline is, that the problem has nothing to do with my application. As I've created new 'almost empty' app. Which could be uploaded. But as soon as I increased the size (over 20MB), it didn't work. I'm interested if anyone else can replicate this behaviour and if so, we can close this one with recommendation that we need to use expansions even for apps smaller than 50MB. – Kelt Jan 15 '13 at 06:14