Google play services breaking for some apps

short-lived

Hello. About a week ago I created a secondary profile on my phone for instagram. After fiddling with it a little bit, I decided it was too much hassle and I'll just use it on my main profile, so I deleted the secondary profile.

Now I don't know if this is just a coincidence, or if it was directly related, but ever since I deleted the profile, Signal and ProtonMail have been acting very weird, both announcing that I don't have Google Play Services installed. The Graphene sandboxed GPS and GSF have been installed on my phone since day one and both Signal and ProtonMail worked without an issue for almost a year.

ProtonMail is weird, every time I open it, it says that notifications won't work without G services, but they still work fine.

Signal is worse. I'm getting a "Permanent Singal communication failure! Signal was unable to register with Google Play Services. Signal messages and calls have been disabled..." warning notification, and no message/call notifications appear until I open the app directly.

I also found this thread mentioning the same issue - https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/x8s1ms/recurring_permanent_communications_failure_on/

I looked around on the web and found 2 suggested fixes. One was to turn off and on the "Signal messages and calls" in advanced settings. I did that, didn't help. So then I found out you can actually just download the apk from the signal website. Did that, it worked fine for about a day, then started throwing the same errors again.

I'm considering uninstalling and reinstalling the google services, but I'm worried it might break other apps. Any advice is appreciated.

short-lived

bump :(

jarelllama

Have you updated the 3 Google apps to the latest version? Could you try uninstalling and reinstalling Proton Mail and see if the warning goes away? Typically in this scenario the app decides if Google Play Services is installed at the first run. So reinstalling could fix it.

I've had this issue before but didn't bother fixing it since I was about to factory reset. I hope you don't have to do the same to fix it.

short-lived

jarelllama

Well I don't have the play store installed, I use aurora and f-droid. So I only have play services and services framework. As for the latest version - funnily enough, the latest version for google play services is apparently 222615044 and I have 223017044, so I'm ahead of release schedule!

MetropleX

short-lived you MUST install ALL 3 packages if you wish to receive support for issues with sandboxed play services. The only package that can be installed without the other two is GSF to help with GCam as an example which doesn't require all of them.

Play Store IS NOT just a shop front, apps increasingly depend on Play Asset Delivery and Play Feature Delivery which require the official Play Store client instead of legacy OBBs which are deprecated and forbidden for new apps. Other Play Store services also require the official Play Store. Apps will increasingly depend on the Play Store for Asset/Feature delivery and other APIs.

shorty

It is not uncommon for Play services to break when it is uninstalled in other profiles. The only solution is to reinstall all Play apps and all affected apps. You also mention you don't have the Play Store, which can also be an issue since it can be used to properly initialize Play services (by opening and pressing sign-in once). Even if you are not going to use the Play Store you should still use it to initialize Play services and disable (not uninstall) it after. You should also blacklist Play services in Aurora Store to prevent it from updating since newer versions need to be tested to work with GrapheneOS's compatibility layer.

short-lived

shorty Oh wow that updating thing is pretty significant. Thanks!

short-lived

MetropleX Bleh, I hoped to install as little from Goolag as possible. Thanks for the clarification.