Last week we ran into a couple of issues installing and running a Windows Phone 8.1 Appx application. Here are some of the symptoms:
- Application deploys and runs fine in the emulator
- Application deploys and runs fine on some phones running Windows Phone 8.1 but refused to install on other phones. The error given by Visual Studio when attempting to install the application was a rather cryptic, and overly useless, error code
- Application package could be successfully signed using the signing tool as part of the SDK
- Signed application package refuses to install on some retail phones running Windows Phone 8.1
It turns out that we were referencing the Active Directory Authentication Library which in turn was making a native call that only showed up when we ran the WACK test. As we weren’t planning to deploy via the Windows Store we hadn’t run the WACK test recently and it was only by chance that I ran it to see if it threw up any errors. Fixing the errors and warnings not only addressed the installation issue it also highlighted some issues with the project structure (incorrect images sizes etc).