cordova run android fails to launch apps with fully qualified activity names in AndroidManifest.xml

[vbansal-bb]

Bug Report

Problem

What is expected to happen?

cordova run android should install and launch the app successfully when the main activity in AndroidManifest.xml uses a fully qualified class name that is outside the app's package namespace (e.g., com.other.package.MainActivity instead of .MainActivity).

What does actually happen?

The app installs successfully but the launch fails with:

Error type 3
Error: Activity class {com.example.myapp/com.example.myapp.com.other.package.MainActivity} does not exist.

The activity name is incorrectly resolved because lib/target.js always uses the /. (relative) notation when constructing the launch intent component name:
const launchName = pkgName + '/.' + manifest.getActivity().getName();

For a fully qualified activity name like com.other.package.MainActivity, this produces com.example.myapp/.com.other.package.MainActivity, which Android resolves as com.example.myapp.com.other.package.MainActivity — a class that does not exist.

Information

This issue affects any Cordova plugin that overrides the main activity with a fully qualified class name via edit-config in plugin.xml. For example:

The resulting AndroidManifest.xml contains:

<activity android:name="com.other.package.MainActivity" ...>

The fix is straightforward — check if the activity name is already fully qualified and use / instead of /.:

const activityName = manifest.getActivity().getName();
const launchName = activityName.includes('.')
? pkgName + '/' + activityName
: pkgName + '/.' + activityName;

This preserves existing behavior for relative names (.MainActivity) while correctly handling fully qualified names.

Command or Code

cordova create myapp com.example.myapp MyApp
cd myapp
cordova platform add android

Add a plugin that overrides the activity with a fully qualified name, or manually

edit platforms/android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml to set:

android:name="com.other.package.MainActivity"

cordova run android

Result: INSTALL SUCCESS followed by launch failure

Environment, Platform, Device

macOS

Android emulator and physical devices

Issue is in lib/target.js — platform and device independent

Version information

Cordova CLI: 13.0.0

cordova-android: 13.0.0, 14.0.1, 15.0.0 (all affected — same code at line 133 of lib/target.js)

Node.js: >= 20.7.0

Checklist

• I searched for existing GitHub issues
• I updated all Cordova tooling to most recent version
• I included all the necessary information above

[breautek]

sounds like something that we can do in a patch but not sure if the proposed solution is sufficient.

The fix is straightforward — check if the activity name is already fully qualified and use / instead of /.:

const activityName = manifest.getActivity().getName();
const launchName = activityName.includes('.')
? pkgName + '/' + activityName
: pkgName + '/.' + activityName;

The original assumption here is that the activity name will be the class name, whose class resides in the root package namespace of the project.

So if we allow fully qualified package name to be used, we could probably also allow a sub-package path to be used as well relatively in which case it will have a . in the string. So using includes('.') could lead to false positives where it should still be using the relative notation.

So I believe the more proper fix would be to test if the activity name starts with the same string as the package name, and if so I think we can conclude that the activity name is a fully qualified path.