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I have an HTC Desire running Froyo. It is not rooted, nor have I installed any custom ROM.

I get an "Insufficient Storage" error when I'm trying to install an app via adb/eclipse. The .apk is only 300KB, and the phone reports 14MB free of internal storage, and 2.2GB free on the SD card. (I have just uninstalled a few large apps to make sure there's plenty of room.)

It is obviously completely wrong. There's easily plenty of room in the 14MB of internal storage for my 300KB app.

What can I do to fix it?

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At least on my phone, it seems you need way more available space thanthe size of the app you are actually trying to upgrade. In my case it seems I needed to have at least ~13MB free space to upgrade anything at all (even for 500KB apps).

Some tips to free space:

  1. Go to Settings, Applications, Manage Applications, click "Move to SD card" on the ones that have that option.
  2. In the same list, also click "Clear Cache" on all your apps.
  3. Your browser cache can not be cleared here, so open your browser, go to Settings, and click "Clear cache".

In some cases I have also been able to manually update apps one at a time when "update all" fails due to insufficient storage.

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I discovered that K9 Mail was keeping 25MB of cached data on my internal storage. I changed it to use the SD card, and this cured my immediate problem of being unable to install a tiny app.

It doesn't explain, though, why Android was reporting an insufficient storage error whilst simultaneously telling me there was 14MB free on internal storage. Oh well.

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  • My old HTC Incredible stored apps in /data/data instead of in the main internal storage partition. This meant that I would get "low storage" warnings even when my phone reported having plenty of storage space left. Super annoying, especially because you can't read the /data/data partition without root. If you are rooted, though, run the following command in a terminal emulator: sudo df /data/data. If you see % used = 100 (or close to 100) then this is your problem.
    – Mr. Buster
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 0:10
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You are trying to install the .apk from a source other than the root directory. Copy the .apk into the root directory and install it from there.

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