After signing cannot run app in emulator due to INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES

Question

I ran Generate Signed Bundle/APK to deploy a mobile app for internal testing. Now when I try to run the build in Android Studio on an emulator I get the following error:

05/03 08:08:31: Launching 'mobile' on Pixel 3 API 29.
Installation did not succeed.
The application could not be installed: INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES

List of apks:
[0] '/Users/.../base-en.apk'
[1] '/Users/.../base-xxhdpi.apk'
[2] '/Users/.../base-master.apk'
APK signature verification failed.

I looked at these articles:

• What is INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES error? It's 10 years old and says to rebuild which I have tried. Does not seem related to the emulator.
• Failure [install_parse_failed_no_certificates] when attempting to install APK to the emulator but there was no accepted answer for it and the answers listed seemed somewhat dated.
• INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_NO_CERTIFICATES error in Eclipse - 8 years old and with Eclipse

I expect this is a common workflow:

1. Deploy an app to internal testing
2. Make changes to app
3. Run multiple versions in emulator, including release, to see effect of new changes

It's when I run it against a released version in the emulator that I have problems, but this is somewhat essential to debugging a production issue if the issue is not happening in dev/staging.

Answer 1

I suppose you have created additional buildType. Each build type must have it's own signingConfig. The debug buildType has preconfigured signingConfig for you.

So your options here are:

1. Create a new signingConfig as mentioned in the link
2. sign you internal testing app with the same debug signing config

android {

  buildTypes {
    internalTesting {
    ....
    ...
    signingConfig signingConfigs.debug
    }

  }
}