Any idea what happend to my android phone apps?

In My Humble Opinion
1

A bunch of the icons on my phone have been replaced by copies of the same icon, which looks like a little green robot peeking out from behind … something like a black box, with reception bars at the top. Click on them and a message pops up “Application is not installed.” If I look at the app settings, the filenames have changed, all with the general format of “com.<suppliername>.<appname>”

Some of the lost items are games (one of which I actually paid for), and apps for stuff like Priceline and weather radar.

I have an antivirus app 360 Security (I have no idea how good this program is) that tells me my phone is clean of any threats.

2

Have you tried restarting the phone?

Have you tried uninstalling an app and then redownloading it from the store?

3

I restarted once without any change.

I haven’t tried uninstalling and re-installing any apps because the message tells me they’re not installed. But I’ll give it a shot.

4

Thankfully, Google will always remember what you bought so anything you paid for through google will be retreivable somehow at some point.

What was the last thing you remember doing before this happened? Something you were opening? Something you installed? Something you connected?

Do you know how much free space is available on your phone?

Since rebooting didn’t work, my next guess would be to clear the cache, but I just want to know the above first.

5

Do you have an SD card and if so have you been moving things to it?

6

I haven’t installed anything today. The last thing I recall doing before that was reading a few emails, but none from unknown places. I have tons of free space available if you include the 32 gig micro SD card.

7

I have one, but I haven’t moved anything to it in weeks.

8

What about without the card? Just internal phone storage? Google doesn’t allow apps to be stored on the SD card anymore so it’s entirely dependent on internal storage if you’re having app problems. If you don’t have a little bit free internally you might have to scale back.

9

Wait…:smack: is this an old smartphone running an old android version back when they allowed installing apps on the SD card? And maybe those apps were on the card? I’d turn off your phone and reseat your SD card if so. You may have to format it and reinstall the apps manually if this is the problem.

10

If these are just the shortcut icons on the home screen of the phone and not the ones in the app list then it happens to me occasionally as well. My fix is to delete the icon from the home screen (press and hold and then drag to the x icon at the top of the screen) and then drag the icon from the main app list back onto the home screen. Works every time for me.

11

I have had this happen occasionally to apps which have been updated through Google Play. I just do what Cyros suggests. Never happened to me en masse though.

12

FYI, I shut down the phone and left it off for a longer time period than the “restart” option gave, and it all came back. First time this happened to me with a smart phone – reminds my of the old “blue screen of death”.

13

Either the apps were uninstalled somehow, or are inaccessible by shortcut.

Are these home screen icons, or in the app drawer? (The app drawer is the pop out menu listing all apps, not just the ones on the home sceen.)

I’ve found that updating an app will sometimes invalidate its home screen shortcut, requiring me to remove the shortcut and put it back on from the app drawer. If you did a mass update in the app store, you could wind up with a few that break their home screen shortcuts.

The other possibility that the storage device that those apps are stored on is inaccessible. If the apps were installed to a removable SD card, and you removed the card, that’s what it would look like. (And not just physically remove, either. If you mount your SD card as storage rather than a music device when plugging it into a computer, you make it unavailable for Android to use, and shortcuts to apps on it would do that. At least, until you unplug from the computer and let Android re-mount the SD card.)

ETA: the fact you fixed it with a shutdown/restart tells me it was the second: the storage device the apps were on got unmounted, and the restart got it mounted again.)