MS Teams bot deploy rejects auto-generated manifest.json with message "Manifest parsing has failed"

Question

I redeployed my (sideloaded) Teams app that implements a very simple bot that auto-messages rooms every day.

This was working for a long time, and I made a slight change so I needed to redeploy, remove from the Teams room, and add it back.

After I removed and tried to add it back (without changing any of the settings) I now get an error telling me "Manifest Parsing has failed"

I also get the following errors in my console log:

Manifest is below. This was 100% generated within Teams, and is not something I made edits to myself, so not sure why it's telling me it can't parse (some fields redacted):

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/json-schemas/teams/v1.8/MicrosoftTeams.schema.json",
  "manifestVersion": "1.8",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "id": "dbb36443-1bce-48e0-81d2-b30aa3698144",
  "packageName": "com.prosourcer-teams",
  "developer": {
    "name": "MY NAME",
    "websiteUrl": "URL",
    "privacyUrl": "URL",
    "termsOfUseUrl": "URL"
  },
  "icons": {
    "color": "color.png",
    "outline": "outline.png"
  },
  "name": {
    "short": "ps-app",
    "full": "ps-chatBot"
  },
  "description": {
    "short": "short desc",
    "full": "full desc"
  },
  "accentColor": "#FFFFFF",
  "bots": [
    {
      "botId": "bfcb70de-e093-4733-b236-742eb3b0aad8",
      "scopes": [
        "personal",
        "team",
        "groupchat"
      ],
      "supportsFiles": false,
      "isNotificationOnly": false
    }
  ],
  "permissions": [
    "identity",
    "messageTeamMembers"
  ],
  "validDomains": [
    "URL"
  ]
}

UPDATE: If I try to add the bot to an individual team, I also get the following error in my console. I have confirmed that appId is correct, not sure where I'm supposed to be setting my TeamsId:

Answer 1

If there's an existing installation somewhere still around it might be causing this. Try incrementing the version number. Currently it's 1.0.0, try bumping even to 1.0.1 or 1.1.0.

Update - maybe there's an issue in Teams - there is a question just before yours today with a similar issue - see "Manifest parsing has failed" when installing teams apps from App Studio . Sounds like an issue with Teams or App Studio. If so, you can try manually uploading the manifest to your internal company store.

Answer 2

Manually change the manifest version to 1.7 (down from 1.8). As of Oct 15, 2020 that is the work around.

manifestVersion": "1.7"

(The Teams App Studio app generates the manifest with version 1.8, but the Teams client parsing fails as you have also run into)