With it, you get online leaderboards, achievements, servers to save games, servers for multiplayer games, ... You will be unable to play with other players if you cancel the connection, you won't get access to the leaderboards to compare your score, etc.
I also dont use google play in my games and also if i play games i cancel the connection.
I dont care about highscore i will be anyway at the bottom of the list
But i agree with informatix, most game or any successful game has google play in it.
Maybe its the simplest way to connect between your game and the world. I think i will need to learn more about it and integrate it in my future games ..
I find it annoying and it just slows down the progress to the actual game even when cancelling it.
and like you said, Ilan. adding a hiscore to your game ain't rocket science either so I don't see a point to use it unless you do some multiplayer stuff to prevent using another additional account.
During the initial connection, another library is run in the background to launch the required services, provide the dialogs and establish the connection. That's why you have to wait. After that, if you cancel the connection, there's no reason to see a slowdown.
first... that app is using a lot of room and data. (33Mb)
thankfully I could move it to the SD.
second... when I clean the data (28Mb by the way!) and got again 56Mb free a minute later it's all taken again by this play service which I never used to log on.
that stuff seems to be doing stuff in the background even when not having played a game in weeks on that phone.
Considering the many games installed on my devices, I can't say that 33 Mb is a lot. 3/4 of these games needs more. But, I'm not convinced that adding graphics in many resolutions or creating stereo sounds (all devices speakers are monaural) is a good idea. That's why these sizes could probably be halved.
it's all taken again by this play service which I never used to log on.
that stuff seems to be doing stuff in the background even when not having played a game in weeks on that phone.
What did you trash ? It's impossible to remove the Google Play Services on an unrooted device. You can only disable them. In all cases, it's not a good idea being given the number of apps relying upon them. Why did you do that? Device with small memory ? Small storage ?
These services are like DLL for Windows. They avoid duplicating code in apps and offer interesting possibilities through API. They are a really good thing.
??? Storage or memory ? Because the other apps have no influence on the memory of the active application. If your device allocates 32 MB to the Java apps, then you get 32 MB for your app. Nothing less, whatever may be the number of services in the background.
Out of curiosity, I looked at one of my smartphones that runs under Gingerbread. I have 743 Mb used and 139 Mb free (internal storage). This smartphone was low-cost when it came out (and I still use it to test performance) so, by comparison, your device is either very old or very cheap. Trying to run recent applications on it is too demanding.