Comment by cptskippy

> Not sure what you mean by "Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory"

A lot of common APIs (Location API, Maps API, Play Games API, Push Notifications API, etc) have been consolidated under the Google Play Services umbrella process. Since these common APIs are used by lots of applications, this would ensure the Play Services process never gets booted from memory.

It also has the added benefit that applications using push notifications like Gmail don't need to maintain a background service because they can rely on Google Play Services to activate them as needed. Location based apps like Yelp can determine your location more quickly because Google Play Services is constantly monitoring it. All while reducing the over all memory foot print of applications because they're all deferring to Google Play Services.

Google can also change their APIs for services, upgrade to new protocols like SPDY, and developers don't need to update their applications because Google just needs to maintain the interface to Google Play Services. It's pretty clever.