Minecraft says «Unable to find manifest in pack»
The file downloaded, Minecraft opened it, and refused it. That message points at the inside of the archive, not at your phone or your game version — which is good news, because three of the four causes take a minute to fix.
What the error actually means: Minecraft opened your file, looked inside for manifest.json, and did not find it where it expects it. The file arrived — it is the contents that are wrong.
1. The archive has one folder too many
This is the most common cause by far. A .mcpack must have manifest.json at the top level. If someone zipped the folder instead of its contents, the file looks like MyAddon/manifest.json — one level too deep, and Minecraft stops looking.
Fix: rename the file to .zip, open it, and check what you see first. If it is a single folder, go inside, select everything, zip that, and rename back to .mcpack. If you see manifest.json straight away, the archive is fine and the problem is elsewhere on this page.
2. It is a .zip that was renamed, not a real pack
Renaming something.zip to something.mcpack does not make it a pack. If the archive contains loose textures, a .jar, or a folder of .png files and no manifest.json anywhere, it is not a Bedrock add-on at all — most often it is a Java mod, which Bedrock cannot use.
3. The file is a world or a skin pack — then this is not an error
.mcworld files and many skin packs have no manifest.json by design. If you see this message while opening a world, the file is likely truncated rather than malformed — see the next point.
4. The download stopped halfway
A cut-off archive fails in exactly this way. Check the file size: a pack of a few kilobytes is almost certainly incomplete. Download it again on Wi-Fi, and do not open it from the browser's notification while it is still downloading.
What we can tell you that the download page cannot
We do not only list files, we open them. Measured on 5 September 2026: 46,733 archives in our catalogue have been unpacked and their manifests parsed. That is how a mod page here can say whether a file is complete before you spend the download.
It also means we sometimes find that the file itself is broken at the source — in which case nothing you do on your phone will help, and the honest answer is to pick a different pack.
If you would rather not do any of this by hand: our free app imports a pack in one tap and tells you up front when a file is incomplete. MC Bedrock Mods on Google Play.