GCM SERVICE_NOT_AVAILABLE on Android 2.2

Question

I am getting the error "SERVICE_NOT_AVAILABLE" on my GoogleCloudMessaging.register() call on a Android 2.2 device.

I am writing an app that uses GoogleCloudMessaging using the new Google Play Services. I implemented it using the guidelines provided on the Android website and my source contains a lot of error checking and handling code such as making sure the Google Play Services is installed, or updated. The GCM registration code also implements a exponential backoff as google as suggested one to implement to handle the SERVICE_NOT_AVAILABLE error.

I have tested my application on a wide array of devices including ICS, JB, Honey Comb and even 2.3.x devices. The GCM registration works and I am able to send messages to it via GCM. However on a 2.2 device I am continuously getting a SERVICE_NOT_AVAILABLE error on the GoogleCloudMessaging.register() call even with the exponential backoff in place.

The device that GCM is failing on is a Samsung SGH-I896 to be exact and the phone has 2 google accounts on it. I've read that this error might be caused by a misconfigured time, but the time is set to be automatic. The phone is not moded and is running samsung stock ROM.

I have also tried rebooting the device as well as reinstalling Google Play Services without luck. Any help on this issue will be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I tried to implement GCM using the old gcm.jar and GCMRegistrar and it ended up working on the device. However I hardly consider this a good solution to the problem as Google has stopped supporting this method afaik.

EDIT2: See the accepted answer.

Answer 1

I know this is an old post, but I just had the same problem, while everything was setup correctly. The SERVICE_NOT_AVAILABLE error, kept popping up. After going to settings => apps => Google Play-servises, and clear the cache and remove the data, it worked.

Answer 2

This error also occurred to me, but it did because I was trying to register in the GCM through a firewall of my company. And in the documentation I found:

"Note: If your organization has a firewall that restricts the traffic to or from the Internet, you need to configure it to allow connectivity with GCM in order for your Android devices to receive messages. The ports to open are: 5228, 5229, and 5230. GCM typically only uses 5228, but it sometimes uses 5229 and 5230. GCM doesn't provide specific IPs, so you should allow your firewall to accept outgoing connections to all IP addresses contained in the IP blocks listed in Google's ASN of 15169."

Once I opened the ports or tried from another network, it worked.

Answer 3

For the time being, until either Google fix this bug or someone provides a better solution I am using a hybrid solution where it will use Google Player Services for the first few times (with exponential backoff) but switch to GCMRegistrar afterwards.