#Android: Google Play won't install/update apps.
Or itself.
This has been ongoing for a few months now. Samsung Tab A (sm-t550), Android 5.0.2. Yes, ancient.
I've gone through Google's fucking worthless troubleshooting:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7513003
1. Rebooted.
2. Cleared memory/cache.
3. Deleted/re-applied system / Google Play account.
4. Booted to Safe Mode.
5. Removed all Play Store updates.
6. Attempted to update Play Store from stock install.
No. Fucking. Joy.
Android status update:
- Backups using adb may work. They took time and used up lots of disk space, but verifying contents hasn't been performed.
- There are some rooting and sideloading options.
- Play Store remains hosed.
- There's a possible LineageOS image for the Samsung Tab A.
Currently Ineed to charge the battery and do some further exploring.
Regarding reading/verifying backups: The Android backup file format is *not* trivially readable.
And all this stuff has absolutely shit documentation.
Here's one of several resources I've found on reading the backup.ab file format:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18533567/how-to-extract-or-unpack-an-ab-file-android-backup-file
I've got the one-liner as a shell script and ... it doesn't work. Possibly because I'd managed to encrypt my backup (the Android-side prompts for what to do are ... unclear.)
Since it took 2.2 hours to generate that, and it's 18 GB...
adb backup / restore can(could?) be a bit temperamental, although its improved a fair bit recently.
To be safe advice for older phones & adb versions is to adb backup each app individually.
I've never been able to restore the apk from a backup that was made using the -apk flag. Needed to install apps (same version number) on the device before running adb restore to get my data
#FDroid is amazing download from their website & check sig or hash
