OnlyInAmerica
commented
7 years ago We currently use Google Play Services for two things: 1) To power our background data update mechanism for older Android versions that don't provide APIs for this. This is pretty important. 2) To provide a more comprehensive device location API. This isn't strictly necessary.
The data update mechanism allows the app to update its underlying database without requiring an app update, and is really useful in letting us fix data issues quickly.
It would be possible to remove the Play Services requirement for Android platforms 21 (Lollipop) and above if we wrote a separate component to handle the data update check. I'll take a look at this, it should be a pretty quick change.
Thanks for the feedback!
The iBurn App does not run at all without Google Play Services. You just get a dialog on launch that requires Google Play Services before continuing. This seems odd for a largely offline app. I think you simply need to disable some check for Google Play Services and iBurn should work fine.
As an aside, apps like Signal and WhatsApp that make serious use of Google Play Service for Google's notifications server employ workaround to function without Google Play Service. These Apps do loose some functionality, Signal burns slightly more battery, and WhatsApp only receives messages when you launch it, but otherwise they work perfectly.