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So far I’ve been pretty happy with my new Galaxy Nexus phone (with marmite sandwich, as my daughter reminds me). Sadly yesterday I ran into the apparently all too common “Download unsuccessful” problem when trying to install an application from the Market. This appears to be quite widespread, and neither of the suggested fixes worked for me:

• Sign in and out of Gmail
• Clear the cache and data for the Market App / Download App

I was not quite ready to perform a factory reset to sort this out, so I connected the phone over USB and ran adb logcat to get some pointers. I tried updating an app and saw this in the log output:

E/Volley ( 6766): [263] BasicNetwork.performRequest: Unexpected response code 403 for https://android.clients.google.com/vending/api/ApiRequest E/Finsky ( 6766): [1] 1.onErrorResponse: Error when attempting direct download of asset [com.linkedin.android]. Error=[com.android.volley.toolbox.AuthFailureError]

As this suggested some kind of authorisation failure I thought I’d check my account details. I opened up my google account settings page and noticed that I had 2 email addresses listed against the my account, and the account I was signing in as on the phone as was not using the primary email address. I added a new account to my phone using the primary email address and removed the old one. I then force-quit / cleared the data and cache files for the Market and Download Apps and tried to install an application again. This time the application download and installed just fine.

Changing over to the primary email address also fixed another problem I had with my contacts not syncing from my Google account.

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