android - SecurityException: caller uid XXXX is different than the authenticator's uid

Question

I received the above exception when trying to implement Sample Sync Adapter application. I have seen numerous posts related to this issue but no satisfactory response.

So I will jot down my solution here in case anyone else gets into the same issue.

Answer 1

Some other useful tips to debug problems like this.

First enable verbose logging for some tags:

$ adb shell setprop log.tag.AccountManagerService VERBOSE
$ adb shell setprop log.tag.Accounts VERBOSE
$ adb shell setprop log.tag.Account VERBOSE
$ adb shell setprop log.tag.PackageManager VERBOSE

You'll see logging like this:

V/AccountManagerService: initiating bind to authenticator type com.example.account
V/Accounts: there is no service connection for com.example.account
V/Accounts: there is no authenticator for com.example.account, bailing out
D/AccountManagerService: bind attempt failed for Session: expectLaunch true, connected false, stats (0/0/0), lifetime 0.002, addAccount, accountType com.example.account, requiredFeatures null

Which means that there is no authenticator registered for this account type. To see which authenticators are registered watch the log when installing the package:

D/PackageManager: encountered new type: ServiceInfo: AuthenticatorDescription {type=com.example.account}, ComponentInfo{com.example/com.example.android.AuthenticatorService}, uid 10028
D/PackageManager: notifyListener: AuthenticatorDescription {type=com.example.account} is added

I had the problem that the authenticator xml descriptor referred to a string resource which didn't get resolved properly during the installation:

android:accountType="@string/account_type"

The logs showed

encountered new type: ServiceInfo: AuthenticatorDescription {type=@2131231194}, ...

Replacing it with a normal string (not resource) solved the problem. This seems to be Android 2.1 specific.

android:accountType="com.example.account"