I have been using apktool to decompile apps and make changes to better fit my touchpad.
One app in particular (swype) I would like to make a duplicate of with a different size keyboard I can switch to. I have tried changing in the manifest.xml any reference to com.swype I changed to com.thumbswype but when rebuilding the app it says some error about PathNotExist.
I also tried changing the app_name inside res/values/strings and while only changing this allowed me to rebuild the app It still wanted to overwrite the existing swype when I installed it.
The manifest is referring to class names in the compiled code, which would be in package comp.swype. So when you change the manifest but don’t change the compiled code, it can no longer find classes with the specified fully-qualified names.
And the Android system uses fully-qualified class names to identify installed apps. That’s why you can’t have two apps installed at the same time using the same fully-qualified names.