I wanted to use the Hue Essentials app on my Xiaomi Mi 10 phone (running xiaomi.eu 12.2.2 ROM) because it offers the “Smart Home Control” capabilities, which were introduced with Android 11. Since this is a premium feature and I don’t use a Google account on my phone, I had to download it over the Amazon appstore. Unfortunatly, the installation of the APK fails without a detailed message. The appstore itself doesn’t show anything and ‘intercepting’ the APK and installing it directly just prints “There was a problem parsing the package”.
Installing it on a different device (OnePlus X with Android 10 custom ROM) works without problems.
So my questions are:
Does anyone know if there is a known problem with Xiaomi devices / xiaomi.eu Roms?
Is there a good way to get further information from the device in order to debug such a problem?
Is there a way to buy premium without an app store (directly from developer to receive code which can be redeemed)?
Thanks for any help or tips!
EDIT: Installing the regular (non-amazon) APK works just fine.
Thanks for the details here and by email. I am looking into it. Amazon re-signs our APK when you download it through the Amazon Appstore so I think something is going wrong there.
It seems that this is indeed a signing issue as you let us know by email. APK Signature Scheme v2 is now required for apps targeting Android 11. We recently started targeting Android 11 for the device controls. We sign our APK with v1 and v2 schemes, so that is why the normal (Google Play) APK works fine.
However, Amazon re-signs our APK when uploaded to their Appstore. It looks like they never implemented v2 signing which was introduced by Google in 2016. That caused the app to crash on Android 11 when downloaded through the Amazon Appstore.
The good news is that Amazon fixed this issue very recently, so the next update for Hue Essentials should start working again on Android 11. I just published an update which should be live within a day.
As mentioned above, should be fixed soon. I actually have a Xiaomi phone with the Xiaomi.eu ROM installed here which we test with Hue Essentials. The Android 11 device controls can be a bit difficult to set up because of how they were implemented on the edit screen. See also: Quick Access Device Controls (Android 11). If you have any questions about this, please let me know.
You sent all the information we needed by email, thanks a lot.
Not possible at the moment. The only payment methods which are available at this time on Android are the Google Play Store and the Amazon Appstore. A redeemable code won’t work as that still requires the Google Play Store app.