As a developer, I apologise for the Play Services requirement. I believe this is a hard dependency for Firebase integration (and at the very least, it's the easiest/fastest way to implement Google Sign-in, though I assume this could be replaced with manual OAuth).

I didn't realize it was such an issue. I'll make a note to investigate how difficult it is to migrate away.

I do not think there's actually a good way for a developer to avoid Play Services, which in turn leads me to say that you should continue to use it or whatever else lets you get the most functionality out of the Android for the least amount of pain. Objectively, an Android user is not going to disable the Play Services as Google's apps will continue to rely on it so non-Google developers should use it as well.

I can certainly echo this sentiment. It is maddening to see Play services as the "culprit" for the bad thing I'm investigating. Very frustrating.

If you're comfortable disclosing, what is this "bad thing"? From my understanding, Play Services provides roughly the same suite of things that are also supplied on iOS, only on iOS, it's built into the OS (location services, cloud messaging, etc.), while on Android it's a modular component that Google can push updates to without a full OS update. Is that not accurate?

Everything that Google announced in the submitted article requires an OS update. So being able to push just Play Services updates doesn’t help too much....