Unhelpful ‘Unable to activate Windows Store app’ Error
Building and deploying UWP apps on Xbox is frustrating – every time I come back to it I get caught out by things that should just work. The one that always seems to get me is that you have to be signed in on the Xbox. This used to not be a problem because Visual Studio used to recognise this issue and provide you a nice reminder – I think it was in the Output window but can’t be sure for certain.
I just attempted to debug an app on the Xbox from the latest version of Visual Studio (both preview and stable) and got the following completely unhelpful error message:
Unable to activate Windows Store app 'XXX.YYYYYYYY_ZZZZZZZZApp'. The activation request failed with error 'Operation not supported. Unknown error: 0x8004090a'.
After rebuilding, cleaning the solution, restarting the Xbox and a variety of other things, I remembered to check that a user was signed in on the Xbox. Sure enough it wasn’t and sure enough, signing in, fixed the activation error.
If you come across this error, make sure you’re signed into an account on the Xbox!!!
thank you! why would they not show this in an alert or something??
thank you!! i can only imagine how long it would have taken me to trial-and-error figure this out… nice find!
Thanks!