[General Questions and Answers] irha:
I know, there are literally hundreds of threads all over the net for this error, but many got it solved by doing one or the other, such as clearing caches, removing odex files, fixing permissions, changing the default installation location to SD, installing via apk, etc., but none of them are working for me. I can't even update SuperSU which is a mere 2.23MB in size. However, this only started very recently, after having been in use for about 3 months and installing and updating apps successfully during this time.

First of all, let me be clear that the issue doesn't seem to be with the disk space. I have plenty of space on all partitions:

1|root@android:/ # df
Filesystem Size Used Free Blksize
/dev 402.14M 64.00K 402.08M 4096
/system 1.19G 713.55M 501.12M 4096
/mnt/asec 402.14M 0.00K 402.14M 4096
/mnt/obb 402.14M 0.00K 402.14M 4096
/data 1.27G 673.40M 628.08M 4096
/sns 7.91M 4.11M 3.80M 4096
/mpt 31.54M 5.60M 25.94M 4096
/persist-lg 7.91M 4.14M 3.77M 4096
/cache 788.39M 14.54M 773.86M 4096
/persist 7.91M 4.10M 3.81M 4096
/firmware 63.95M 41.80M 22.16M 16384
/storage/sdcard0 1.27G 673.40M 628.08M 4096
/storage/external_SD 58.55G 4.55G 53.99G 32768
/mnt/secure/asec 58.55G 4.55G 53.99G 32768

However, when I try to update SuperSU and run ls -l on /data/data/com.android.providers.downloads/cache directory, I see that the file gets downloaded exactly to the size of 541495 before play store gives me the dreaded error. When I tried to update Play Services (16.18MB), the download exactly stops at 8200630 before giving insufficient storage error. I verified this several times, by removing the partial files and attempting to install again and every time, the download stops at exactly the same size. The partition of course has plenty of space as can be seen from above.

root@android:/data/data/com.android.providers.downloads/cache # ls -l
-rw-r--r-- u0_a19 u0_a19 541495 2014-08-14 22:43 downloadfile-1.bin
-rw-r--r-- u0_a19 u0_a19 8200630 2014-08-14 22:38 downloadfile.bin

I was able to install some really small installs successfully, but that is also not very consistent. I also tried to install apk directly using adb, and that too fails with the same error:

$ ./adb install -r /tmp/Google\ Play\ Services.apk
3627 KB/s (18901801 bytes in 5.088s)
pkg: /data/local/tmp/Google Play Services.apk
Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE]

I captured logcat while trying to install apk and it had the below warning:

W/ActivityManager( 569): No content provider found for permission revoke: file:///data/local/tmp/Google Play Services.apk

Someone suggested that this would happen if the permissions on /data/local doesn't include write and execute perms for others, and sure enough I had the issue, so I fixed the perms, but it neither took the above warning away nor the insufficient storage error. I also of course tried to copy the apk to phone and install it by opening it with a filemanager.

Could someone please help me troubleshoot this issue further? At this point, I have uninstalled at least 10 apps to clear up more than 200MB, and yet I can't update a mere 2MB app and neither can restore any of those apps back with TitaniumBackup (TB restore just never completes). I didn't try factory restore yet, but would like to keep that to the end, since I will end up losing the root, and I am not sure if I can root it again (I had to struggle for it the last time)

Phone Model: LG Optimus F6 (T-Mobile)

Android version: 4.1.2 (stock, rooted, debloated)

Build number: JZ054K

Software Version: D50010h