hangouts and play services All my friends are chatting over hangouts and I feel left out. So I installed hangouts to be a part of their chats. I love hangouts on the computer and was super excited about getting it on my phone (samsung galaxy ace). However when I proceed to open hangouts it poped up a message saying that I need google play services for it to run. So i then went to the app store to download this, however it takes up half of the memory on my phone!! I don't have enough space to download it and now hangouts is useless. Please help.
First off (to everyone else), Hangouts comes default on all Android phones, people don't know they already have a working copy of Hangouts.. but they do, its in the App drawer, not the normal pages. You don't have to goto Google Play to get it.  Unless you have no clue how to buy a phone, in which case your fruity phone starts with the letter i.

Anyhow, now to disappoint you:

Sorry, an update to the newer Google Play Services is required for Hangouts.

You need more space.

However...  Google Play Services definitely stores a lot of data. You can actually limit and delete this data to save space. In my case it is currently at over 120MB. Goto Settings > Apps > All Apps > Google Play Services > Storage > Manage Storage.  Another screen will pop-up called "Google Play services storage".  At the bottom you can clear out that cache (120MB in my case). And at the top you can view your search data. From that screen the search data can't be deleted. I presume you might have to clear the data for each app individually. Speaking of which...

If you want to scrap some more space, you have to use some space, at least for a moment.  Download CCleaner and clean your phone. It also has this weird notification permission you have to set manually for it to free up more space.
It will try to clear the data on your apps, but doesn't seem to get them all. If you are still lacking space, goto Settings > Apps and ... painstakingly... click on each app and clear its data. Well, you might not want to do apps you use daily. And after this, the app will think it was freshly installed and not run yet. So the next time you run it, you will have lost your saved game or login. Keep this in mind when choosing which app's data to clear.

So "clear the data" from Google Play Services and other apps, then uninstall CCleaner for more space... then try again.

Of course deleting photos/music/videos from the phone will save you more space than probably any other solution.  You can prevent the Sync from happening by going to Settings > Accounts > Google > [your email] > and turn off sync for just about everything, except what you specifically want to sync. Like, maybe, contacts for one example. Then, if you clear the app data, it won't come back.

Also, you can goto https://photos.google.com and https://get.google.com/albumarchive to permanently delete photos/videos that are in your account and are trying to sync.

And finally, If your phone supports an SD card, get one! Put that sucker in and wonder why you haven't had one ever since you got the phone as you move apps and photos to the SD card and free up all sorts of space. Not all apps can be moved to the SD card, and not ALL OF THE app gets moved, just most of it.  There is no easy way to do this (besides some questionable 3rd party apps). Similar to above, you have to goto Settings > Apps and ... painstakingly... click on each app (to see if it supports moving to SD card), then click "Storage". If it supports being moved to SD card there will be a new third button called "CHANGE" near the top. If you click that you can pick from "External" or "Internal" it should be obvious but "External" is the SD card and "Internal" is your regular space on your phone.

This can save you a lot of space.  

Or even better yet, move your Pictures/Music/Videos to the SD card. You will need a file explorer like Astro or ES File Explorer. And knowledge of how to move files around with those apps. I'm tired of typing so you can figure that one out.

PT