Sorry Erel. I found the issue. When you mentione RAF, it suddenly struck me what might have happened.
When the app was com.test.app, I had created an RAF file containing my custom type called channeltype. Later this file is read using RAF for displaying in the data. After creating the RAF file (from the contents of a site), I realised the site doesn't get updated frequently and so I commented out the RAF file creation part and instead just read the file using RAF every time the app runs.
Now when I changed the packagename, I still used this old RAF file. I guess the file also contains the data type very explicitly, including the package name. Now I deleted that file, created it once again using RAF, commented out the RAF creation part and continued with just reading. And it works great.
I am extremely sorry for wasting your time, that too on a Sunday