SharePoint 2013 App Deploy Error: "A different version of this App is already installed with the same version number"

Question

I have developed a very simple Provider-Hosted App which I was deploying to our SharePoint Online Developer Site.

Testing was going fine, and I had deployed it several times to the site, before I suddenly received this error in Visual Studio 2012 after I hit F5:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Install app for SharePoint': A different version of this App is already installed with the same version number. You need to delete the app from the site and the site recycle bin to install this version.

The thing is, I had just deleted / removed my app from the Developer site and from the recycle bin right before I received this error.

Not sure if this is relevant: but one of the changes I made to the program was to give the App Write permissions for the Web scope via the AppManifest.xml file.

I'm not finding anyone with this exact error on Google search results, so I thought I'd be the first to post it here.

Any help / ideas? I'm fairly new to developing for SP13.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

First off welcome to the world of SharePoint dev. SharePoint can be quite painful with holding onto things, but the solution in your case is fairly easy - anytime you make a change to the AppManifest increment the version number. This is done on the general tab of the AppManifest, or if you're directly editing the xml then it should be the third item in the App tag.

Changing to 1.0.0.1 should fix your problem straight away, it is also a good habit to get into as then when you are deploying an app manually (not hitting f5) you will be able to update the old version of the app instead of having to completely remove it.