If you play games on your smartphone or tablet that utilize syncing with Play Games, you should note upcoming changes that are taking place. Thankfully for users, these changes are the kind that greatly benefit players, and should positively change your experience when you first start up a gaming application.
As announced today, Google is switching up the Play Games permissions, hoping to limit the amount of time gamers have to spend granting permissions and syncing their Google profile. Once these changes take place, here’s what you should expect to see, or rather, not see.
Upon rollout of these changes, players will be prompted to sign-in only once per Google account, instead of being prompted once per game. So, instead of opening a new game and going through the permissions screen, your new games will automatically sign in, as long as you have already signed into your account on that device. Even better, Google will no longer require your account to be “upgraded” to Google+ to use Play Games services, and will allow any Google user to take advantage of Play Games’ leaderboards and achievements.
If you would rather sign into each game individually, instead of automatically, you can disable this feature in the Play Game app’s settings.
Google notes that developers won’t likely need to change anything on their end, and in the long run, this will be a much easier process for anyone who enjoys downloading new games and quickly get to the playing. However, if the developer uses specific Google+ features to make something work in their game, a few changes will be needed, but it’s nothing major. If you are a developer, be sure to read the Android team’s complete writeup of the changes.
First thing I do when I get my phone is disable Play Games. I never understood the appeal of gaming on a phone anyways, unless it’s for your young child to keep them occupied.
You, sir sound boring.
I game a lot, but I do that on my PC and Xbox. Mobile games only kill your phone battery and consume even more time. If I’m bored someplace I’ll just browse social media or read news articles or something.
For those who don’t own a good PC or console,phone is the only option left.Anyways I’ll continue to game on my Android even after I get a good PC.There are many AWESOME games on mobile which have great touch controls.(2048,8 Ball Pool,etc,etc)You should also give them a try.Also great for passing away time (in college :D).
I just want permissions to actually work how I want them to/need them to.
If a game asks for access to my phone and contacts and I deny it, the game will not open. Google permissions needs to let me open the game and just deny the app access to what I ask.
This is not the same thing. It sounds like you are referring to the permissions that an app or game want access to on your phone when you install. What they are talking about here is when you run a game and it connects to Google Play Games and wants to see your friends, etc, and post to G+ on your behalf and who can see those posts. You can override the defaults, but you have to do it with each and every new game. This appears to change it so you set that once and it’ll remember for any new games that get added.
I don’t think permissions can ever work like that. Some permissions are necessary to run certain apps. That would be like downloading Instagram, denying it access to your camera, and still expecting it to work.
If I want to make sure Instagram can never take a picture, yet still use the app, I should be able to block access to the camera, and the app should be able to resolve such an exception thrown if it has good developers.
What wonderful news that I don’t have to have a G+ profile to use Play Games. That means I can now finally use it. Fantastic!
I have given permission to many games to get the play games features.
So when this features rolls out can i revoke the permission to the games and still have access to already synced data.
or will revoke remove my existing data