Dear community,
We as OH GA team, are excited to announce that finally there is a new release coming with the following changes/updates.
1. Announcement: New release with updated device support
Besides a huge amount of internal code changes, also new features are included:
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New devices types like TV, Light with separate brightness & color items, TemperatureSensor and Sensor (no idea how this works on the user’s side)
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Support for Contact items for Locks and OpenClose devices
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Changed tfaAck to ackNeeded and tfaPin to pinNeeded to be more in line with Google’s attributes (former ones are kept for compatibility)
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And a lot of other changes, e.g. new attributes for some devices (e.g. discreteOnlyOpenClose, queryOnlyOpenClose, volumeDefaultPercentage, levelStepSize)
Please refer to the updated documentation for more insights on how to configure the new devices. (Some details might not be documented. We will work on that.)
Furthermore, we want to get back into a more regular release cycle. That’s why we are also working on some automatic deployment options.
2. Announcement: Deprecation of tag support
We already substituted the use of tags for exposing items to Google with metadata many months ago. However, the usage of tags was still supported for backward compatibility reasons.
Since this has often caused confusion and uncertainty in the past, we would like to discontinue the support as of 2021/06/01. This means that from this point on, items that were only exposed by tags will no longer be available in your Google Assistant / Home app.
For those who are still using tags are asked to migrate their configuration to metadata by then.
Please refer to the documentation for the appropriate options.
As these changes have bigger impact, it might happen that we will have interruptions of the service. We will need some help of testers, to monitor that the new code changes perform well in production.
Please understand that pushing this out fastly would have been a risky move, so we prepared it and also postponed it for some time.
But now it is time 
There will be also a new deployment pipeline, which will speedup deployments to production.
A massive thanks to @michikrug , who is actively working on many features and pushed this forward.
Greetings
Michi & Mehmet