Google AdMob Ads SDK Version 4.1.1 for Android and iOS has been released

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

The latest version, 4.1.1 of iOS/Android SDK, has been released. It
corrects a number of issues that can be seen in the change log here
(http://code.google.com/mobile/ads/docs/rel-notes.html). Please
download it from http://code.google.com/mobile/ads/download.html.

[dm1973]

I upgraded and have seen a couple of crashes which I think are admob
related. I don't have any real proof and haven't been able to
reproduce so I thought I would ask if anyone else is seeing them

at c$a.run(Unknown Source)
at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:587)
at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:92)
at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:143)
at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4196)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507)
at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit
$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839)
at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597)
at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)
2.3.3
Desire HD
java.lang.NullPointerException

and

at android.content.ContextWrapper.startActivity(ContextWrapper.java:
248)
at
android.webkit.CallbackProxy.uiOverrideUrlLoading(CallbackProxy.java:
209)
at android.webkit.CallbackProxy.handleMessage(CallbackProxy.java:312)
at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123)
at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4363)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521)
at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit
$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:860)
at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:618)
at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)
2.1-update1
SPH-M900
android.util.AndroidRuntimeException: Calling startActivity() from
outside of an Activity context requires the FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK
flag. Is this really what you want?

The good news is that I am not seeing the "Only the original thread
that created a view hierarchy can touch its views." crash.

On Jul 19, 2:32 pm, Eric Leichtenschlag <eleichtens...@google.com>
wrote:

[Tim]

Thanks for the stack traces. I think I may have found the first issue
and corrected it. I am unable to reproduce the second issue and I
don't see any of our SDK code in the stack trace, so it seems like if
it is in fact related to our SDK, it might be an Android bug. Can you
provide some example code that reproduces these issues, particularly
for the second issue so we can try to find a workaround?

Thanks,
-Tim

[Gino]

Tim's email just unnerved me. So there's a significant bug in the
version you guys just pushed out LIVE to PRODUCTION ? The admob jar
is only about 50K in size.

I am reminded of an incident where my teaching assistant at college
lowered my grade on a coding assignment by a full letter grade. He
had found a boundary condition which I had missed, simply by reading
my code. I asserted that big companies like Microsoft had lots of
bugs in their code. He replied, "Yes, but this coding assignment was
only about 10 pages long -- there shouldn't be any bugs in." And he
was right.

One possible alternative approach may be to ask a small group of
developers to incorporate the latest admob sdk. This way, if there
are significant issues with it,
it limits the damage to that initial small group of developers. By the
way, if it isn't obvious I would NOT be interested in being in that
beta test group of developers..

Gino.

[dm1973]

Unfortunately right now most of my evidence for blaming admob is
circumstantial. It only happened after integrating the SDK and the app
doesn't do much with webkit. Here is a link to a prior person
reporting this

http://groups.google.com/group/google-admob-ads-sdk/browse_thread/thread/cc7fc087f2ec247e/ccc9c84b37e11351

I wish I could reproduce when attached to a debugger but it hasn't
happened yet. If you know of anyway to collect remote info that would
help fix bugs like this I would be more than happy to look into
integrating.

On Jul 20, 4:11 pm, Tim <timzwie...@google.com> wrote:

[dm1973]

Simple solution. Don't upgrade for a week or two after a release is
done to see what issues are reported. So far I am much happier with
the unknown bugs in this version than the know ones in the last.
YMMV:)

[William Ferguson]

Very timely, I just received another instance of
http://groups.google.com/group/google-admob-ads-sdk/browse_thread/thread/cc7fc087f2ec247e/ccc9c84b37e11351
I'm getting about 3 or 4 a day now.

So far I've only seen it for Android 2.1 and 2.2. But that is not
surprising considering the device breakdown across my users.

Tim, it may be that it's an Android bug, but it's clearly being caused
by webkit interaction kicked off by the Admob AdView. The only
component in my app that uses webkit is Admob. There is no Android
issue listed that seem to match. And the top Google search result for
"android.webkit.CallbackProxy.uiOverrideUrlLoading(CallbackProxy.java:
228)" points straight back to the conversation listed above.

Perhaps
- the WebView used/extended by AdView is not being configured with the
correct Context
- the Ad data that it is trying to display is sometimes corrupted
- the WebViewClient configured for the WebView is doing something
strange.

It really looks like a Looper is sending messages, but not on the UI
Thread.
How that has occurred I don't know. But someone with access to the
source should.

William

On Jul 21, 12:54 pm, dm1973 <david050...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately right now most of my evidence for blaming admob is
> circumstantial. It only happened after integrating the SDK and the app
> doesn't do much with webkit. Here is a link to a prior person
> reporting this
>

> http://groups.google.com/group/google-admob-ads-sdk/browse_thread/thr...

[Gino]

Guys, you know what ? Admob SDK 4.1.0 seems to work fairly well, at
least for me. One of my apps has over a million ad hit requests so far
this month and no issues that I can discern.
I checked my Developer Console crash logs and searched for
AndroidRuntimeException and found no occurrences..

I'm pretty happy with Admob SDK 4.1.0. In terms of the bugfixes
incorporated into 4.1.1, I don't recollect seeing anything that was
compelling enough to upgrade the SDK at this point.

Also, if the AdMob SDK works fine 99.99% or 99.999% of the time, that
may be as high as you can go. I've got about a couple dozen weird
crash errors that I'm never going to look into because I think they're
just sporadic glitches that have nothing to do with my code. The
danger with trying to go from 99.99%/99.999% to 99.9999% is that you
may actually introduce a new issue(s) and start breaking things that
worked fine before. In other words, if you fix something that ain't
broken, you're liable to break it..


Gino.



On Jul 20, 11:10 pm, William Ferguson <william.ferguson...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Very timely, I just received another instance ofhttp://groups.google.com/group/google-admob-ads-sdk/browse_thread/thr...

[dm1973]

The developer console logs less than 10% of the crashes that my own
logging code does. YMMV but I wouldn't assume because your not seeing
crashes in the console that they are not happening. 4.1.0 had a pretty
serious but with touching views from the wrong thread.

This last batch of admob sdks (4.x) has been significantly lower
quality than the previous ones. I am guessing that is because of the
integration work being done. Hopefully in another 2 or 3 months the
quality will be back up there. These are not rare crashes. They happen
every 50k impressions or so which is a lot when you serving a couple
million impressions a day.

[Sheado]

Hello,

I just got the same crash.
We are scheduled to update this weekend. Will there be a fix to this
soon or should we revert to 4.1.0?

Thanks,
Chad

On Jul 20, 8:07 am, dm1973 <david050...@gmail.com> wrote:

[I.D.E.]

I got this issue reported in a crash log which a user submitted. It
appears on my Android Market Developer Console:

java.lang.NullPointerException
at android.webkit.WebView.stopLoading(WebView.java:1649)

at c$a.run(Unknown Source)
at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:587)
at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:92)

at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123)
at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4627)

at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521)
at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit

$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:858)
at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:616)
at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)

This is for an app that uses AdMob SDK 4.1.1 for Android.

The stack trace doesn't mention any of my code, and I don't use any
WebViews. There's no other information on how this crash happened. I
suspect it's something to do with rapid orientation changes.

[Side note: It would be extremely useful if the Developer Console
showed us statistics on which versions of the app are installed on
users devices]

[William Ferguson]

IDE, you might want to consider using ACRA to capture app crashes.
You'll get a lot more info (and a lot more reports) that by relying on
users posting to the Market Console.

[VincentYang]

I tried the new ios version of the sdk that there are still memory
leaks,When automatically updated in each ad, each increased by about
5.57KB (1.67MB / 1 hour, updated every 12 seconds), this reaction had
been in before, but it seems not solved ~

Using Instruments in xcode I have managed to identify that something
called :
"GOOGLE_SHUFFLE_RVS__Users_waylonis_Code_afma1_googlemac_iPhone_GoogleAds_S
ignals_PROTECTED_build_GoogleAdsSignals_build_Release_iphoneos_GoogleAdsSig
nals_build_Objects_normal_armv7_rc4_S1"

How do I fix it? Thanks in advance~

[dm1973]

Tim,
Do you have any idea when an SDK with the fix for ( at c$a.run(Unknown
Source)) will be released. I am seeing it quit a bit. I have added a
bunch of tracing it is appears to me that it happens when the activity
is destroyed before the ad request is fulfilled but I don't have a
very reproducible case yet.

On Jul 20, 4:11 pm, Tim <timzwie...@google.com> wrote:

[Tim]

dm1973,

Thanks for the extra information about the bug. We have a few other
things we'd like to fix/change/add in the next release, so we're still
working on it. We don't have any kind of official release date right
now, but my best guess is a few weeks.

Thanks,
-Tim

[nagamatu]

I encountered the same problem by just calling WebView.destroy on 1.6.

I fixed this by calling AdView.stopLoading and AdView.destroy instead
of WebView.destroy.

--
nagamatu

[dm1973]

Is there anything you can suggest as a work around short term? This
bug is by far my #1 crasher.

[Jan]

Hi,

we are using ACRA reporting and our reports are full of these
NullpointerException errors since we updated to AdMob 4.1.1 SDK. This
must be fixed in AdMob SDK! (obfuscated class c$a)

Regards,
Jan