Application updates not recognised on new BlackBerry devices?

24 September 2008 by Alex Laurie

One potential issue for BES administrators – especially at the moment with the BlackBerry Bold 9000 recently out on the market – is that the BES server may not recognise the device. This is a problem that most often occurs when you’re trying to do tasks such as push Java applications down to a new device.

Symptom: applications aren’t arriving on devices

You’re looking at BES Manager and it says that everything is ok:
“IT policy status: applied successfully… configuration status: OK… application status: up to date”.

Click the image to see larger.

However when you look at the BlackBerry, your application simply isn’t arriving and installing on it. BES Manager isn’t really giving you much useful information to work with. Fortunately there are some quick tests and fixes you can do.

Diagnosis

Firstly, you should confirm that your application is capable of running on the specific device by building it in the latest BlackBerry JDE and running it in the simulator. This will prove your app is correctly built for the target devices (your developer should have already done this).

Secondly, check the policy logs in the \Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Logs for today – you should search the text file for the pin number of the device you are struggling with.

• the most common scenario is that it will say that “Either the vendor ID xxxx or hardware ID xxxxxxxxxx is not supported.” See Fix 1 below.
• The next most likely scenario is that your device’s software configuration says “install required” but your application isn’t getting to the device. See Fix 2 below.

Fix 1 for unsupported device or vendor ID

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Download the latest Device XML and Vendor XML files from RIM (it’s good practice to make sure your device and vendor XML files are updated regularly.)
2. In the directory C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\AppLoader back up the old versions of these files then put the new ones in there.
3. And for a belts-and-braces approach it would also be worth restarting the BES services in the correct order.

Fix 2 for “install required”

When your device’s software configuration says “install required” but your application isn’t getting to the device…

1. Try changing the speed at which new apps get deployed. Normally it takes up to 4 hours for an application to deploy on a device but you can speed it up if you follow the instructions on this page. (For development purposes we tend to set this at 5 minutes so we can add and remove applications quickly for testing, but we would not advise this in a production environment.)
2. And remember to always restart the BlackBerry Policy Service after making changes.

(This note is a rewrite of RIM’s article KB13589.)

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