My 2 cents. I only need location services and ability for purchased apps to pass licence check. Currently ug does this for me. I only have one app that doesn't function fully using ug, because I think it uses some form of account authentication that ug seems to not provide. I think that as time goes on and ug remains unmaintained we will see more apps that will have authentication problems.
In essence my vote would be to bump the version number but maybe also make users aware that problems can occur when using this updated version of ug.
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As far as I have understood the problem, when reading through the open issues in the GmsCore repo of microG, there are basically three underlying causes for the below symptom:
Symptom
Updated apps having most recent Google libs/resource dependencies baked in. Those check for play service version and complain about version not recent.
1. "Stupid" version check
The version check is automatically done by the embedded Google stuff. If the version check indeed is all, which counts (i.e. no new functionality, which actually would be part of the "original" play services), then the version bump of the NoGoolag or NanoDroid forks will already solve the issue.
So I'll include it in my next builds (September ASB).
2. Truly updated functionality
If the updated app attempts to make use of a new play services functionality, which would really require the checked play services version (e.g. new APIs), then - obviously - the spoofed version number cannot solve any issue and would most probably lead to an app crash (as the version check normally should prevent this). This may be more of a theoretical consideration, I am not aware of anything except for FCM, see next item, but this possibility definitely exists.
3. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)
Google works on replacing Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). As far as I know, Google urges the developers for apps targeting Oreo to make use of FCM and not to use GCM any more. So even if people have Nougat on their devices, updated apps with push notifications will more and more point to FCM.
FCM is not implemented in microG and as this is a completely new development, this won't happen immediately, especially given Marvin's restricted time to work on it.
The good news is, this won't make an app crash, but push notifications simply won't work. Work-arounds here would be to either accept not working push notifications in an app (not all push messages are anyhow useful; I e.g. always enjoyed the microG feature to explicitly disallow this for most apps), to look for alternative build variants (Signal e.g. offers a GCM/FCM-free build for download, FDroid offers a Google-free Telegram build) or to continue using the last GCM supporting version of your app (or downgrade accordingly).
EDIT: microG has published a new version and it really seems to habe improved a lot, so I'll stick to the original
