• AdMob adapter is now fully compatible with the GMA Next-Gen SDK. The banner fallback view no longer references com.google.android.gms.ads.AdView, which does not exist in Next-Gen, so publishers migrating to com.google.android.libraries.ads.mobile.sdk no longer hit NoClassDefFoundError.
• Improved reliability of Recommendations reporting and click handling.
• General fixes and improvements.

• Google Mobile Ads (play-services-ads, ~4MB) is no longer pulled in transitively by the core SDK. Direct integrations with no AdMob mediation no longer inherit GMA. The SDK now ships play-services-ads-identifier itself, so no publisher setup is needed.