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.