WinRT App's package family has more than one package installed.

Question

When I go to debug our app I get the following error message

Microsoft Visual Studio

Unable to activate Windows Store app 'xxxx'. The activation request failed with error 'This app's package family has more than one package installed. This is not supported'. See help for advice on troubleshooting the issue.
OK Help

When I dig out the event log I found this error.

The app xxx App's package family (xxxx) has more than one package installed. This is not supported, so the app was not activated for the Windows.Launch contract.

In order to find out what other packages are installed I run the following PS script:

Get-AppxPackage -all 

Looking at the output from the previous script I only see the one package that is installed from the visual studio location. I uninstalled the app from the start menu and run the script again and there is nothing installed.

The app is signed so I can’t change the package family name.

I have followed the steps in https://stackoverflow.com/a/14340075/127067 and I still can’t run our app from VS or from the installed package.

How do I find the other errant package family name? Dig through the registry?

What are some steps I can follow in order to run the app again?

Answer 1

Hard to guess how you did that. Double-click the Package.appxmanifest file in your project. Select the Packing tab, you'll see the Package family name for your app. It is made up from the package name, a guid, and a hash of your publisher name. The guid is supposed to make it unique, make sure you didn't change it.

Installed Store apps are recorded in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppModel\Repository\Families registry key. Compare the entries with yours, a match will be a problem. Do try to get it uninstalled as normal before you start hacking the keys.

Answer 2

I also faced the same problem while I am developing a Windows App and trying to debug the same on my development machine.

So from the error message itself, it's clear that there is already an app installed on your app and installer cannot continue further because of that.

And above post, you get an idea what is happening inside our system and installer.

First time fixed the same problem with registry cleaning and clearing the registry entry for that particular app. You need to more mindful while doing the same.

But the second time, I face the problem again.

The actual question is why this is happening, at least on my machine.

When we try to create an app package (Project->Store->Create App Packages), we may change the package Version. This is the place where we are somehow creating that error.

Let's say I have already app installed on my machine from debugger with Version 1.0.0.1 and the second time we creating the app with version 1.0.0.2. Now, after creating an app we launch Windows App Certification Kit tool for verification of our app and it will fail (in my case). And if I want to debug the Windows app, it will show above error.

To solve this problem, what I did was, created the app package with the same version which is already installed on my machine and then tried to launch the debugger and that worked.

So this is my solution for this error. There may be some other way to solve this problem other than this and above mentioned solution.