Why do random apps keep making duplicate icons of themselves?

[lotus1922]

Running Lollipop on an LG G4, default launcher, not rooted. Can't find anything on Google for this particular problem I'm having:

This just started happening a couple weeks ago with the Aviary photo app. It created a second icon of itself in my app drawer and when I dragged one of them to the "Remove" button at the top of the screen nothing happened, the icon was still there. Dragging it to "uninstall" of course uninstalled the entire app, and even then sometimes the extra icon would still be there.

Within the last couple days it's started happening with more apps: Skype, Farm Heroes Saga, Candy Crush Saga, TextNow, and Facebook Pages Manager. Aviary, Farm Heroes, and Candy Crush ended up with THREE icons each, and the rest with two.

Various combinations of force closing, cache clearing, uninstalling, rebooting, reinstalling, and virus scanning seems to clear some of the duplicates, but then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole where the duplicates of one app go away, but then they come back for a different app.

Hiding the extra icons in my app drawer at least makes them invisible, but I want the suckers GONE completely and also figure out why this started happening in the first place???

Many thanks!

 

[B. Diddy]

Considering the list of apps you mentioned, this probably isn't the case, but are you certain you're not creating Progressive Web App shortcut icons for those apps? https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/progressive-web-apps/

 

[lotus1922]

Considering the list of apps you mentioned, this probably isn't the case, but are you certain you're not creating Progressive Web App shortcut icons for those apps? https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/progressive-web-apps/

Hey thanks for replying. I didn't even know what that was until reading that link in your reply lol, so I'm pretty sure it's not that. I've installed those apps the same way I've installed all my apps--- directly from the Google Play store. The weird thing is that the duplicate icons appear Only in my app drawer, not on the home screen. So for example, I have one shortcut to Skype in a folder on my home screen (which is what I want), but when I open my app drawer there could be 2 or 3 additional Skype shortcuts there!

Like said, this only started happening in the last couple weeks. Can't remember now the exact timeline but I had recently turned off "automatic updates" in Google Play after a Google Maps update made it crash and I had to downgrade to the last known working version. Not sure if/ why that would cause the icon copying though?:-\

 

[B. Diddy]

Hmm. If you don't mind having to set up your homescreens again, you could try clearing the app cache/data for the LG launcher. I'm not sure exactly what it's called, but it's probably something like Home, Launcher, LG Home, etc.

 

[lotus1922]

By jove, that worked! A pain to have to set everything back again, but a small price to pay for sanity. Thank you for your help!!!

 

[B. Diddy]

Great! Let us know if the problem comes back again later.