what are the benefits?
If you want to watch HEVC on a Jolla1, here you go.
If you want to watch AV1 video on a XA2, also.
Want to hear a mms:// stream, that is what you need.
Or hear AAC audio without a device with gstreamer1.0-droid
No versionitis…
Thanks for explanation! These are good reasons. But MP3 is 70% of web radio, podcasts, most of lossy coded portable audio files. We cannot lose it. Please, make the dependency to (lib)mpg123 more precise, so that package managers would automatically install a version compatible with your gstreamer build.
There are several gstreamer packages in OpenRepos and it is hard to understand the ups and downs of installing them for a common man.
this was not intented 
should be fixed now with 1.18.5-4 releases (+other fixes in changelog)
works now with mpg123>=1.25.10
To me that is exactly that: Versionitis!
New versions will have new features, fixed bugs and new bugs.
Always (no matter how the details vary)!
It is Jolla’s job to offer new versions of the packages their Linux distribution (SailfishOS) is comprised of (per new SailfishOS releases).
Plus SailfishOS (especially its update mechanisms) is quite fragile, hence one better avoids exchanging extant packages from Jolla by third party ones. Installing third party RPMs, which replace Jolla’s original RPMs, regularly results in the upgrade horrors this thread depicts so nicely. And this will continue until Jolla offers the mechanisms modern Linux distributions provide to handle this: “Repository pinning (vendor repos)” and / or at least “repository priorities” (currently SailfishOS’ SSU knows only prio “99”).
no, you can have all those features with my gstreamer1.16 builds but not with jollas 1.18 ones, it’s called build options…
This update time I was also affected by update problems , the half of the apps didn’t work and by trying to repair it went only worse.
To end this update limbo, I took the SD-Card with all my data out of the phone (and also the SIM-Card) and reflashed it.
Now it runs really fine except few apps (unfortunately Advanced Cam, too).