I encountered a problem that changing preferences in APG did not change
the preferences in ApgService after it was called once:
1. call getPreferences
2. change settings in APG
3. call getPreferences again
--> the result at 3. was still having preferences from 1.
To work around this, the function getPreferences has been updated to
force the new generation of preferences while not breaking any other
code relying on the old behaviour.