Market Updater not running on HTC Evo 4G

I recently noticed something on my HTC Evo 4G that never worked: the Android Market auto-update feature. According to this support page, the Android Market application should auto-update itself. Mine never did. And since it never did, I did not know that it was supposed to update.

Over the holidays I saw the Android Market on my brother’s HTC Evo 4G looked completely different than mine. Whereas he was running the latest version, I was still stuck with stock version that came with my phone.

I could not determine the root of the problem, but I observe the following two differences:

  1. My phone ran Gingerbread, whereas my brother’s phone was running Froyo.
  2. The Market Updater on my phone did not appear to be running. Under Settings > Applications > Manage applications > All, the listing for Market Updater 1.0 had all buttons grayed out. I figured the Forced Stop button being unavailable implied there wasn’t a process associated with the application.

Since this had never auto-updated for me, I manually updated the application with the following steps:

  1. Downloaded the 3.4.4 APK to your phone
  2. Under Settings > Applications, check the box to Allow Unknown Sources of non-Market applications
  3. Agree to updating Market

Finally, it is worth noting that my girlfriend’s HTC Evo Shift 4G exhibited the same problem as my phone and was also running Gingerbread.