Fixing erroneous “Insufficient storage available” errors on Android
2013 July 27
Short answer: the fix might be to delete /data/app-lib/APP-PATH/lib.
You need root.
What better way to spend a sunny morning than fixing problems with my phone?
For a while, I’ve had problems on my Nexus 4 where certain apps would refuse to install, or I couldn’t update them once they were installed. The error message would be “Insufficient storage available,” but that was clearly wrong because I had plenty of storage space available and the apps were small.
Now, most technical problems are best addressed with thorough Googling, but this kind of problem is a toughie. Amateur-hour Android phone futzing is a fascinating corner of the internet in its way — grounds for a dissertation in cargo cult behavior. Between poor reading comprehension (“try moving your apps to the SD card!”), lack of actual knowledge of how the system works (“I dunno, try clearing all of your app data?”) and excessive leverage (“try upgrading your CyanogenMod hacked ROM to the latest version and running [root]CacheCleaner-v7.x”), there’s a lot of light but very little heat.
To be fair, one of the issues is that this kind of error message apparently has many root causes. My impression is that if anything goes wrong during an app install, you’ll get the “Insufficient storage available” error.
In the end, the root cause of the error seems to almost always be a leftover
file that somehow interferes with the intended install/update. For instance,
for many people the problem seems to be leftover .odex files in /data/app ([e.g.](http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1810294)). For me,
the problem turned out to be strange dangling files in /data/app-lib. In
both of the cases I had to deal with, there was a recursive symlink named
/data/app-lib/APP-PATH/lib, and blowing away that file solved the problem.
(Here APP-PATH is something like com.fsck.k9-1 for K9 Mail. Hypothetically.)
I could imagine that in other cases you might need to blow away the whole
/data/app-lib/APP-PATH directory
(cf.)
The lame thing is that you need a rooted phone to do this — the relevant
files are system files. If leftover app-lib files are causing your
install/update problems and you don’t have a rooted phone, I think you’re
just sunk. Which makes this a pretty bad bug. Maybe an OS update will prevent
this from happening at some point; if not, maybe there’s a way to convince the
OS to delete the offending directories on your behalf. Hopefully a fix that
works on stock phones will come along, because this problem seems to bite a
lot of people.