[cdesai]

> Making it system-only still isn't ideal. It then requires a full OS update to push updates to microg/playservices

It does not, you can update system-apps out of band just fine.

Google does it with Play Services (and many other apps), and we have our microG builds in our F-Droid repos for out of band updates.

In fact, that is one of the big selling point of Play Services - the fact that it gets updated outside of OS updates, which means that you have a recent / the latest version on all devices regardless of their update record.

And therefore anything implemented in Play Services can be used even on older Android versions.