Google Play Services come pre-installed on just about every Android phone (well, except those sold in China). They are an essential mix of high and low-level stuff, everything from contact syncing to geo-positioning goes through these Services.
Play Services became the first mobile “app” (if you can call them that) to reach 5 billion installs. That’s 5 with nine zeroes. Granted, a good chunk of those are probably on devices no longer used, but as we said, there are also Androids not included in this count.
Whichever way you look at it, it is an impressive number. And in a sense,…