AndroidI had a client bring a Verizon Droid Razr phone into the shop because it was not working properly. The Google Play Store app crashed as soon as it opened. The techs at Verizon told her it was because she had too many pictures on her phone (seriously?). While she was low on internal storage, she wasn’t out completely. Something else was going on. I moved a couple apps around, but it seemed like the apps were already well balanced between phone storage and the 32GB SD Card. She was also getting a number of notifications “Download English (US) failed. Insufficient Memory”. These were sticky notifications you could not clear.

I tried the usual – clearing cache, clearing data. Nothing would get the Google Play Store to start. Then I found a forum thread where they mentioned the ‘Download Manager’ app might be disabled. You go into the Apps section of Settings, swipe over to ‘All’ and scroll ALL the way down. Sure enough – Download Manager was listed as ‘disabled’. I tapped it, enabled it, and tried the Google Play store. It opened right up and proceeded to download a TON of updates. Clearly this phone had been stuck like this for a while.

Once all the updates had installed, I clicked one of the notifications about ‘Download English (US)’. It brought up a Google Search settings page listing English US. Tapping it, I was prompted to download an update for it. I did so and it worked! Problem solved!

Or so I thought. Despite the download completing – there were still about 8 sticky notifications about the failed download for English (US). You could not clear them. Rebooting the phone didn’t help. Since it was Google Search, I cleared the cache and data for that app. Still no luck. I used Clean Master to clear all cache. Did not help.

After much research online, I finally found a suggestion that the notifications were from the Download Manager app. Made sense. I cleared the cache for Download Manager and the notifications went away.

So in short – if Google Play crashes, check to see if the Download Manager app is disabled for some reason and if you get any ‘stuck’ notifications about downloads for any type of update, clear the cache for the Download Manager app.