I suspect that's because the phone market is very hard to get into. If I remember correctly, they didn't have any carrier partners, which is how the majority of

I suspect that's because the phone market is very hard to get into. If I remember correctly, they didn't have any carrier partners, which is how the majority of phones in the US were sold at the time (and probably still are). The success of Fire tablets, such as it is, is enough to show that it's possible to ship a device without Google Play Services and be in the market. Why does it have to be a phone?