For the past few months I have been getting notified by my Android phone that I am almost out of storage space. When I investigate I always find close to 4gb of data under Google Play Services.
I can remove the data, but I don’t know what it is or why I kept getting it. I looked at the app to see if I could tell what it was doing or if there was some setting that I could change, but I could only find one thing: remove updates and go back to the original version (or something like that, I didn’t write it down). This sounded ok as an option, so I selected it.
When it was finished, I seem to have lost Google Play altogether (it does not appear on the list of Apps, although there are several other apps that start with “Play”, such as Play Books, Play Music, Play Games, etc.). So now I can’t add any other apps to my phone.
Can I get Google Play back (preferably without anything as drastic as a factory re-set)?
Once that is done, can I prevent it from accumulating all that apparently useless data all the time?
I’ve had similar issues with anything Google-related on my Samsung. I’ve also discovered that nether Google or Samsung likes SD cards and will somehow disable whatever’s on the SD card every chance it gets. I’m still having issues even after deleting stuff.
Since it’s only gone back to the original version, it must still be on your phone somewhere. It may have moved the icon or renamed it, but you shouldn’t be able to delete or remove it since it’s an essential phone service. You could access the Google Play store through the web, navigate to the Google Play Services app, and tell it to update on your phone from there.
I’ve heard that this is a bug stemming from having data in say, Google Drive or Google Docs (or Books, or Music, or literally any other cloud data you may have with Google) that is syncing to your phone. As in, every file you have in the cloud is trying to be downloaded to your phone. Since plenty of people said that they didn’t actually show any data use during this period, it may just be Google Play Services allocating free space to be filled in by your cloud files, coming up against no more room in the phone, and just stalling out without actually getting to the downloading stuff part. Thankfully. But in order to stop it you would need to to disable syncing of these separate services to your phone (Docs, Drive, Books, Music, etc etc) and then go in and clear all google play services data. That should keep google play services from bloating up.
Macca26, I don’t use the cloud so far as I know (of course I might have randomly clicked OK on something somewhere without realizing it). The problem with the data itself is that I couldn’t seem to break it down any further than the Google Play Services bloc to see what was in it.
I have checked every visible app in the list of apps and I don’t see it there. Not sure where else to look. I will try your suggestion to update from online. Thanks.