Google Play Services is required, but Google Play (market) is not installed .. what to do?

Question

We want to distribute our application in China, but we currently have a BIG issue.

The application requires Google Play Services installed. It normally works well: the user is prompted a dialog, and the brought to the Google Play application where he can install the Google Play Services application.

And in China? When an Android phone is bought in mainland China, it usually does not have Google Play installed. And it stays that way, users usually never download the Google Play application (see here and there).

So what we are trying to do is: when we detect that the user does not have Google Play installed, we send him to an URL where he can download the Google Play Services APK directely. But - as expected - we could not find stable url where the apk is available for download.

Did any of you encountered the same kind of problems? How did you resolve it? If not do you have ideas, suggestions? Any help would be much appreciated :)

Thank you!

Answer 1

The Google Play Services APK is only available from the Google Play Store and doesn't support installation on devices without the store app, see http://developer.android.com/google/play-services/index.html

Depending on what kind of functionality you use from the Google Play Service APK you would need to use a 3rd party API or implement it yourself.