Installation Error: APIInternalError

I know I know, Flash is dying. Sadly Adobe announced the end of life for Flash Player, but I have high hopes that Adobe AIR will live on and I love ActionScript 3.0. Recently at work I was updating an old app that we created in AIR and I was running into some problems when trying to debug it on an iPad. It would build and then while it was trying to install the app it would throw up an error that said “Installation Error: APIInternalError”. I’ve seen this error before and have usually gotten around it by just unplugging the iPad and plugging it back in again or restarting Flash Builder or IntelliJ. I think I even had this happen once before and I got around it by updating the Apple certificates. I tried all of that this time and nothing was working. After a very long time searching online and pulling my hair out (that I don’t have) I came up with the following suggestions:

  • Make sure that iTunes recognizes the device
  • Run the following command in the AIR SDK bin folder ‘adt -devices -platform ios’
  • Verify that the Provisioning Profile has the device included in it
  • Unplug the cable and plug it back in
  • Plug the cable into a different USB port (try plugging straight into computer if you have a USB hub)
  • Is the version of iOS a beta or too new? If so, try a different iPad with a different version
  • Try installing a dev build (ipa in the bin-debug folder) in iTunes
  • *Download a new version of the AIR SDK

 

I did get mine working again and I think that the main problem was I trying to test on an iPad that was running a new beta version of iOS 11. Running it on two other iPads that were running iOS 8 and iOS 10 worked. *The fix for iOS 11 was to wait and get a new version of the AIR SDK.