Duplicate files in /data/app-asec/ on Android

By | 10 Nov 2012

On Jelly Bean, using FX with root, I noticed duplicate files in /data/app-asec/, e.g.:

  • com.disney.WMW-1.asec (56,9 MB)
  • com.disney.WMW-2.asec (56,9 MB)

It looks like one is obsolete and consuming almost 60MB.

So I deleted the older ones of the duplicates and also renamed all files to have the suffix -1.

After a reboot, some apps were not working. The launcher showed a “app is not installed” message.

After some more research, I found the file /data/system/packages.xml which contains lines like these:

<package name="com.disney.WMW" codePath="/mnt/asec/com.disney.WMW-2/pkg.apk" resourcePath="/mnt/asec/com.disney.WMW-2/res.zip" nativeLibraryPath="/mnt/asec/com.disney.WMW-2/lib" flags="0" ft="13ab353ea00" it="13484d822a3" ut="13ab3547873" version="16" userId="10214" installer="com.android.vending">Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

So I changed these lines to read com.disney.WMW-1 and after one more reboot, all apps worked again. AND I had 500MB more free space.

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