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Why I do I have to have both Services Google Play and also Shop Google Play applications on my phone? They take quite a lot of memory space, which is quite small on my ZTE SKATE. I have an SD card with about 6GB space, but I can't move these over there. And when I try to delete Services Google Play it downloads on its own when I go to Shop. Why is Google doing this? When I got my phone I had only Google Shop there. Now this. I'm running out of space and there aren't any other apps that take a lot of space like this and I could delete/uninstall them.

Can anyone tell me what exactly is the difference between these two apps and why I need to have them both installed? And if I don't need them, how can I get rid of one of them so I have more space?

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  • Try moving as many apps as you can to the SD card. You say you don't have many large apps, but even if you can get a lot of smaller apps to decrease their footprint in main memory it can add up. I used to use an app called SDMove which was quite helpful in that regard, although there are other, similar apps you can use.
    – ale
    May 24 '13 at 13:41
  • Well I have everything I can moved on my SD card, so :(
    – Ms. Nobody
    May 26 '13 at 17:28
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Google Play Services is a library used by other Google and third-party apps. It allows apps to use:

  • Google Maps layers to show maps in other apps
  • Google+ sign-on and sharing
  • the new Google+ gaming functionality for match-making, leaderboards, and to store saved games "in the cloud"
  • Google Cloud Messaging to sync data from the Internet to your device efficiently
  • Location services to set up "geo-fences" so they can respond to locations and activities more efficiently than if they accessed your location directly

It's a lot of functionality that could have been made part of Android itself, but making it a separate library allows Google to update it directly, so app developers can rely on it being up-to-date on every device: unlike Android itself, which some manufacturers and carriers don't bother to update for older devices.

If you were to remove it, any apps that rely on it would stop working or behave unpredictably.

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  • Is it okay if I delete the Google play shop app and just use the browser if I need any new apps? :D 10Mb too much for me :/
    – Ms. Nobody
    May 24 '13 at 12:13
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    I don't think you can. When you choose an app in the browser, it just sends a signal to the Google Play app to start downloading the app you asked for.
    – Dan Hulme
    May 24 '13 at 13:30
  • Damn :( I guess I have to give up Angry birds...
    – Ms. Nobody
    May 26 '13 at 17:29

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