As you can most likely see I have not written a blog post in a long while :). Being busy with work and all, it does not seem to be as bigger priority as it was in Uni days!

Yesterday I upgraded my Google Nexus 4 from KitKat to Lollipop, Android Version 5. Normally these upgrades go well from Google but yesterdays one went very wrong. Findings so far seem to suggest it may have been down to a lack of storage available on my phone which prevented certain things from executing and installing but that is not definitive. Even so having read around the Net I can see others had the same symptoms as me.

After the upgrade whilst the phone booted and I could access it, the phone itself was sluggish and at times unresponsive. Most odd after the upgrade was all my Google authored apps like Google Play, Gmail etc. would not work whilst others did. Again these symptoms seemed to shared by others.

Whilst looking around the phone within Apps (Settings->Apps->Running), I could see Google Play Services was constantly trying to restart and and would hang. This lead me to believe there could be an issue here which also ties up to why the other Google apps were not working as expected. I could also see the version of Google Play Services was not the latest and the version shipped with Lollipop.

With all the above in mind I came to the conclusion Google Play Services needed to be updated and did not get updated in the original upgrade. However with Google Play Store (a Google App ) being down this had to be done manually. To do this I followed these steps:

1. Allow Apps from Unknown sources (this can be disabled later) – Settings->Security->Unknown Sources.
2. From your phone or via a your computer with a USB cable download Google Play Services APK file:
   1. http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/ – The APK file can be downloaded here. Please ensure you download the correct version for your, there are instructions on the site on how to know which one to choose.
   2. If downloading from your computer copy the APK file to a directory of your choice.
3. If you downloaded direct from your phone, got to Downloads or navigate from your phone to the directory you stored the APK file.
4. Tap the APK file, choose open with installed and Install.
5. You may need to reboot the phone but I found things then to start working as expected again.

There is no warranty of guarantee for this process from me (Simon Money) or anyone else I know but what I do know it worked for me and its a better alternative to factory resetting your phone :).

Bye.