Fixing false “insufficient storage available” errors on Android
For some reason, I started to get some of these Android errors and did some searches to figure-out what was happening. I think it happened after I used some cache cleaner apps or something. There are a lot of other posts out there on this but here is what works for me. I’m running Cyanogenmod 11 on an HTC One (M7) so YMMV.
Errors have started to kick-up on certain apps and I can’t even determine a pattern for ones that this generates for whatever reason. Chrome was one that this happened to for me. Google Play SHOULD be able to just play the update on the screenshot below. 
Except, it stops. So, in investigating this there are many posts out there that reference the app-lib directory under /data. Popping-open a Terminal and getting into the directory with root lets you nuke the files that get stuck. 
On CyanogenMod, you want to go to /data/app-lib and su or sudo to be able to nuke the stuck files. 
You can do a search with an ls -l and grep to see what is in there for the app. Then come back and delete it. They are little directories that might get stuck. This removes the data around the install that don’t want to play nice with Android. 
After the removal of the stuck directories and files, you can play the update.
Update: June 1, 2014
The permissions on the problem files somehow got messed-up. You can see that the owner/groups are not system.
So, when I fixed the permissions with a chown (the -R option is not available to all the Linux folks out there!) it helps correct the issues.
This gets everything to have system owner and group.
Wait I still dont understand
This is more a fix around Android permissions than can get messed-up with tools that attempt to help.
Take care,
– Jonathan
I had this problem, and running Fix Permissions in TWRP fixed it for me.
FYI, you CAN use -R option with chmod, but you must call busybox first. Just thought I would point this out.
busybox chmod -R system:system *
Correction…
busybox chown -R system:system *
Shawn,
Cool. Thanks for posting on this!
All the best,
Jonathan
That’s a total lifesaver. Thanks for the detective work!
Well played. Thanks to you, we have fixed my phone 🙂 It has been driving me nuts!
Glad to hear. Thanks for taking the time to post and confirm it helped!
All the best,
Jonathan
For those of us who are a bit more noobish, a specific mention of the commands to use at each step would be useful. Thanks. I’m pretty convinced this is causing the problem on my Galaxy Note 10.1, since it’s only some apps that receive the insufficient storage error.