As my loyal readers know, I’ve been working on my first Cordova application, focusing on Android.  Of course I found the Android emulator to be very slow, so I worked solely in a browser for a few days.

When I tried installing on my phone (using Cordova run Android), I had a rude surprise – The app crashed on startup, showing a message before any HTML was visible:

Unfortunately, [Insert App Name Here] has stopped.

Thinking back to what I had done that might affect the configuration or interface layer, I eventually remembered that I had changed the name of the application. I had initially accepted project defaults, so undertook a small rebranding effort.

After a bit more digging and testing, I found that everything that could have broken is pretty much auto-generated from Cordova’s config.xml file when Android support is added to the project.  This includes java code bearing your application name, etc.

Rather than pick through that code, I simply removed Android support from the project, and re-added it.  Problem solved:

cordova platform remove android
cordova platform add android

Takehome point: Dev work in the browser is fine, but test any configuration changes on a phone or *real* emulator.