Use latest Google Play Services

[mlanter]

Switch to use the latest Google Play Services.

The pain point is that by specifying a specific version it doesn't work with other libraries which specify the latest version of Google Play Services (which most do). It causes a crash because when it is compiled it will include some of the latest version and some of 9.4.0 and then when it runs it crashes.

It's generally safe to assume users have the latest Google Play Services as the updates are pushed automatically. As Google says "Google Play services gives you the freedom to use the newest APIs for popular Google services without worrying about device support. Updates to Google Play services are distributed automatically by the Google Play Store and new versions of the client library are delivered through the Android SDK Manager."

This matches a similar decision that was made to use react-native:+ in #547

[alexHlebnikov]

If newest version of GPS will be not installed on user's device, the app will crash when user will try to interact with map.

[mlanter]

It's a tradeoff between crashing for users that don't have the latest GPS versus crashing for projects that use newer versions of GPS.

I'd lean towards requiring the latest GPS, because

• Google says it is safe to assume the latest Google Play Services
• The react-native-maps project has tended to error on the side of supporting only the latest versions of dependencies given the rapid change of pace (based on the Compatibility part of the readme)
• We'll be able co-exist with other react-native libraries, most of which require the latest GPS.
• Last time this was discussed in Bumped google-play-things in build.gradle to 9.+ #533, the decision was to support the latest GPS with the tradeoff of requiring users have the latest version (which Google says is a safe assumption).

[mlanter]

cc: @spikebrehm @felipecsl @lelandrichardson

[felipecsl]

use version 9.6.1 explicitly

[mlanter]

Just curious, what's the advantage of explicitly setting it versus using + (similar to what's done for react-native)?

Looking at the most popular react-native libraries that use Google Play Services the rest of them use +, which makes it difficult to use them with react-native-maps.

[felipecsl]

This issue has been vastly discussed in previous issues, this is a really bad practice that RN introduced that tends to cause lots of subtle bugs that are hard to track down.
The overall best practice is to never use + since Gradle interprets it as "hey, I depend on this library, but any version is fine, I don't really care what gets used".
This leads to many problems since you almost always want to limit your range to be "at least version x.y.z or newer". This is what Gradle will do for any explicit version, eg.: 1.2.3 means that version or anything newer than that.

[mlanter]

Thanks for explaining, that makes sense.

I still had the issue of dealing with multiple projects requiring different versions (which causes a crash on launch because it includes part of one version and part of another). An example being react-native-device-info.

In case it helps others, what I found worked for our project was forcing a consistent version for a group of libraries.

Here's the code we added to our build.gradle-

configurations.all {
    resolutionStrategy.eachDependency { DependencyResolveDetails details ->
        if (details.getRequested().getGroup() == 'com.google.android.gms') {
            // If different projects require different versions of 
            // Google Play Services it causes a crash on run.
            // Fix by overriding version for all projects.  
            details.useVersion('9.6.1')
        }
    }
}

[felipecsl]

Please use version 9.6.1 explicitly