Resolve! plugin_not_installed issue in Ionic 3/4 Applications

A few days back I was facing a strange issue i.e Plugin Not Installed! in of my Ionic 3 Application. The weird thing about this issue was, the application was working fine in development APK and even after creating productions release of APK it was working fine, the issue used to happen when I installed the application from Playstore after release.

In method catch section I was luckily having an alert which shown me this error “plugin_not_installed”. I was using Ionic’s App Version and Ionic’s Admob Free plugin and I was facing the issue in both these plugins methods.

After some research, I found a list of various forums people facing with similar issues, but they were having some plugin related issues which were resolved for them later. In my case, as this was in two plugins, so something else seemed to be wrong.

How I resolved plugin_not_found issue?

yes! after Installing and uninstalling plugins and creating release versions again and again then uploading on play store, then banging my head for a whole day I finally found a solution!

I pointed out that I was calling App version and AdMob free method in my constructor ( which I also tried to load in ionViewDidLoad, didn’t worked ). Then I tried to call my method in platform ready method as follows:

Not Working Code

// THIS IS NOT WORKING :(
....
....  
constructor(
    public navCtrl: NavController,
    public admob: AdMobFree,
    private appVersion: AppVersion
  ) {
      this.appVersion.getVersionNumber().then(value => {
        this.appVersionText = value;
      }).catch(err => {
        alert("1-> "+JSON.stringify(err));
      });
      this.showBanner();
    });
  }
....
....

Working Code 😀

//THIS WORKS FINE :)
....
....  
constructor(
    platform: Platform,
    public navCtrl: NavController,
    public admob: AdMobFree,
    private appVersion: AppVersion
  ) {

    platform.ready().then(() => {
      this.appVersion.getVersionNumber().then(value => {
        this.appVersionText = value;
      }).catch(err => {
        alert("1-> "+JSON.stringify(err));
      });
      this.showBanner();
    });
  }
....
....

After wrapping, methods in platform ready everything got back to normal 🙂

What may have caused the issue?

I think this is something related to placement of cordova.js file which is added in head section while other js files are added in body section so, due to which only I think maybe the reason of this issue. As the issue is resolved by placing the code in platform ready so it may be related to the platform on which we are loading the application.

I shared this hack which worked for me to help if it can save someones precious time 🙂