Ever thought of leaving some of the Google Apps behind and moving on?

What if you left and moved away from some of these Googly Apps? Would the world suddenly stop and go dark?

+Jake Weisz posted that by Jan 1st 2015 he would leave all of Google's services, to which he hasn't completely done so yet. Well, neither have I, but you'll see if you keep reading.

No, nope, I don't think it would, but you may notice something that could prove to be interesting.

What do you think this could be? I experimented several weeks back and what I ended up with was quite interesting in itself. Intrigued by now? Continue reading on.

What would happened if you left and moved away from some of Google's Apps? Nothing really, you'd find a way to replace them and move on. Why would someone consider doing something foolish like that?

In the last little while, I noticed an increasing drain on my battery and like most, I started to investigate. I'm on a stock Android version of Kitkat 4.4.4 which was released for my handset by Sony. I'm not running any mods of any kind since I'm purely stock, unrooted and quite frankly, I don't have a need to go beyond a 3rd party launcher.

Factory imaged phone, right from the vendor, I start to load it up like anyone else would. Login to my Google account and start installing the typical applications, Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Google+, Photo etc...

Fast forward to 3 weeks later, I keep having to charge my phone in the middle of the day. This beast, the Xperia Z2 with a 3200mAh battery wants to be charged after 10 hours of usage? You have to be kidding me, I don't even have 2hrs worth of SOT.

For anyone that’s been using the Sony Xperia line of smartphone, you know that they've included detailed statistics about the usage of the phone, making it easy to determine what could be causing the battery drain.

I'm pretty sure that at this point, even +Tom Gray would have a few things to say about Google's apps and services on Android.

Turns out that Google Services, Google Play Services are the main culprits. Keep Awake and CPU usage, which doesn’t include the disproportionate amount of data being used. This led me to disable, uninstall all the applications I’m not using. I started to purge all the Google Apps I didn't want to use or find an alternative that would be less resource intensive.

Replaced Gmail with CloudMagic, replaced Photo with Album (Sony’s version), disabled Play Music, disabled Play Movies, and disabled Google Newsstand etc. It was now time for the removal of some sync items from the account section under your settings.

I left, contact, calendar, people details, Google+, that was it for the items being synced by Google.

Fast forward to 2 weeks later and I'm running into 30hrs worth of usage with 6+ hours worth of screen time. Google's Play Services and Google Services are running at less than 2% on any given day.

Nice little discovery wouldn't you say. Now this problem isn't happening for everyone on every device. We have our very own +Ryan Moore, who hasn't experienced this problem.

We will all have various reasons for using or not using said applications, whether it be from Google or another. 

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