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I recently got a HTC One M9, and I wanted to replace it's gallery with my old phone's gallery because I loved one of the filters that it had. This led to me having to download a third party APK file, but when I tried to install it, it just gave me an error that said "App not installed." I first thought it's because it won't install because the current gallery is still on my phone, but after disabling the app, I still get the error message. Is there any way I can fix this?

The APK file is MIUI's Gallery app if that helps.

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    Hope you have enabled unknown resources in your settings/security or privacy.Also third party apps from samsung/miui or sony etc needs their own frameworks and other supporting files to work and install properly.
    – Iftekhar
    Oct 13, 2016 at 6:22
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    You will get a better error message when installing the app via adb. Enable Android Debug Bridge on your phone and connect it to a PC with Android SDK. Then install the apk file via adb install <filename.apk>
    – Robert
    Oct 13, 2016 at 11:12

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Generally you can't install one manufacturer's built-in apps on another manufacturer's phone anyway. The built-in apps are written to take advantage of the specific hardware on that phone and/or extra libraries the manufacturer includes in their system image. Camera apps are a particularly bad culprit because often they rely on the features of the camera chip and on a custom image-processing library.

As well as the technical problems, this is software piracy. The app is made by the phone manufacturer to give that particular phone a competitive advantage. It's only licensed for use on that phone. It's not like on Google Play where you buy an app and then can use it on any phone.

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  • I'm not sure I would call it software piracy. It's breaking a EULA at worst. Hardly a criminal or in civil infraction, it's contract law. And, you're only breaking the EULA if you agreed to it.
    – Evan Carroll
    Jun 22, 2018 at 19:18

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