We (the CC team: my son and daughter-in-law and me) have spent a fair amount of time discussing what to do. We have decided to leave the license check in CC but to deal with the case where there is no Google Play Services installed.
Our rationale is the same as it has been from the beginning.
- A pirate will pirate no matter what we do.
- There are people who obtain CC through "non-official" channels who aren't really trying to pirate the app. If CC reminds them to purchase it then they probably will. This isn't a huge group of people, but they exists.
- For the case where someone wants to run CC off-line: the person can do that by letting CC check the license once while connected to the internet. Actually finding a calibre installation (successfully connecting) is not necessary. From that point on CC won't check the license. As such, a solution exists for this case. Note that this is a similar case to using CC on a device with a restricted account (e.g., a child's account).
- We think that the number of people who own devices without Google Play Services but don't own a device with such services is close to zero. Such a person can obtain CC using the device with GP. It is a very reasonable request to be able to run CC on the non-GP devices the person has, and today no solution exists. We will fix that.
- If for some reason none of the above is acceptable, then the person can "pirate" their purchased copy of CC.
These changes will be in the next beta, which I will release sometime this week.