Why the need for Google Play Services?

I was just about to switch from TR to this app but noticed it won’t run on my device.
I’m using a Hammerhead Karoo and sideloading. Can’t use my phone since my trainer only supports control over ANT+, not BT.

Niche use case, I realize. But what specific need does an indoor training app have for location services and Google Play?
TR, Xert etc all run fine. Is it possible this dependency might be able to be removed, since it really honestly shouldn’t be there in the first place?

Cheers

I believe it has to do with BLE. BLE for some reason isn’t working without the location services. Not sure about the details.

Oh yeah sorry it’s the same in the other apps actually. Could’ve skipped that aspect, my question is really about play services.

You can read a bit more below, the problem is an app can somehow determine your location with BLE so google requires it. I am getting more and more interested in hammerhead. It might be easy for us to give you an APK without location services if that would allow you to test it.

Cheers that’d be perfect, but as mentioned in my second post the issue isn’t actually location services, but Google Play Services.
It apparently used to be possible to unlock the bootloader long ago and install that, but sadly not anymore. So any apps dependent on Google Play (and I again question why yours would actually need to be - what is it used for?) can’t run.

Edit: and yeah apart from battery life it really is the perfect head unit now that their software is starting to reach feature parity with others. And very easily sideloading proper apps is definitely a nice bonus!

On android devices I can give you a .APK file that you can just click and open from a web page and it will install it, this bypasses the Play store.

I did not read it but it sounds like this article talks about it.

I know Xert is focused on the hammerhead experience also so you can see what they are doing.

No problem installing, I was referring to a pop-up that said the app required Google Play Services to function.
However, I now realize one can simply ignore that warning - the app works perfectly fine on the Karoo as it turns out :slight_smile: sorry about that!

And I should have done my research, did not realize you don’t support ANT+, only BT. That sadly makes app unusable for my Bkool.
Are there any plans to add FE-C or will you be sticking with strictly BT?