Mike Laurence's Internet Playground

If you’re building & deploying apps to your iPhone, you may encounter this dreaded and shamefully unhelpful error message at some time. It’s happened twice to me; the first time, after scouring the Internets for answers, it looked like I only had a couple of choices: either jailbreak my iPhone and do some SSH trickery or restore to a previous version. I went for restoring, and it was even more irritating than I thought it would be.

But you don’t have to restore your phone, and you don’t need to jailbreak, either; just change the application’s package identifier:
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The hidden problem (as explained by the post linked to above) is that there are broken bits of your app hanging around in an inaccessible folder on the iPhone. However, if you change the package name, it will use a different folder for deployment, so you will no longer be dealing with the broken parts.

Of course, if you’re really sold on that initial app identifier, then you’ll have to restore or jailbreak eventually. But maybe by the time your app is ready to send off to the Committee of Endless Deliberation, you’ll be on the next OS, and it will have some sort of automatic cleanup to deal with this issue. I mean, it had better.