Deploying universal application results in "package could not be registered"

Question

We recently upgraded to the new Visual Studio and subsequently Windows Phone 8.1 preview. However when trying to deploy to the device or Windows Phone emulators(any of them), we get this error(0x80073CF6).

My phone is already developer unlocked. We have been successful in deploying it and running the application once, but now for some undetermined reason, it has stopped allowing us to do this.

I am willing to provide any more information if I can.

Answer 1

May be you are missing icon image in your manifest file. Please look at this.

Answer 2

There's also a possibility that the GUIDs listed in your Package.appxmanifest file don't match the ones in WMAppManifest.xml.

I had to do some changes to the first one before publishing a beta version of my app to the store and didn't update the second. Specifically

• PhonePublisherId should match PublisherID
• PhoneProductId should match ProductID

Answer 3

It seems if you remove anything from assets folder this error occurs. In my case I had removed splash screen image from assets folder after commenting splash screen line in manifest everything is OK.

Answer 4

You might have checked "Shared User Certificates" in your manifest, remove it and it works.

Answer 5

Check this answer as well. This solved my problem!

Deploy error: Package could not be registered

Answer 6

In my case, I needed to reset my phone for it to work.

The Deployment did always work on the emulators, but not on my phone. I've had my Application already installed from the store, as I've started to Deploy. My guess is, that the version from the store somehow did not uninstall correctly.

(I'm posting this here, because it is the first result on google)

Answer 7

For future reference: I have encountered this error a few times and it was a combination of missing icons (which you can figure out somehow), but also:

the pipe-character "|" in the app name.

It is completely legal reserve the name, and your manifest won't complain about it, but I have seen that removing this will help in solving this issue.

Answer 8

You can remove the reference in the package.appxmanifest as well and the app will still deploy, as in:

It will work I got it.

Answer 9

In my case it was incorrect XML file with duplicated header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<WindowsPhoneReservedAppInfo ... />