Hundreds of ANRs using the Google Play Services admob version

[Christer Nordvik]

We have over 200 million ad impressions a month on Android and after switching to the Google Play Services version of the AdMob ads it has been a disaster. We now have hundreds of ANRs related to the ads and we are getting a lot of frustrated users. We have also removed the adView.destroy() to try to avoid the issue but while that helped a little, the problem still persists. 

Can we get any insight in how this issue is handled? Can we expect an update soon or do we have to switch to another ad SDK? The issue has been known for a month now so I would have expected an update by now... 

[Christer Nordvik]

Since we have removed the AdView.destroy() it seems like that causes leakage of active adviews which in turn makes the battery usage of the app go sky high on some Android 4.4 (Nexus 5) devices. People have now reported our app using almost all the battery and I see for myself that the log is full of messages like: 

I/Ads     (13605): Ad is not visible. Not refreshing ad.

I/Ads     (13605): Scheduling ad refresh 60000 milliseconds from now.

So we are getting a bit desperate for a solution here. We don't want to move move our entire ad business elsewhere but this is getting to be a big issue for our app now...

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

As mentioned in another thread, the SDK engineers haven't reproduced locally but are making a change that they hope fixes this. However, the fix won't be available until around the release that is still several weeks out.

For situations like this, you may consider taking advantage of mediation. You could integrate another ad network and send all requests elsewhere for now. When the bug is fixed, you could turn back on AdMob if you so choose with a couple clicks.

Thanks,
Eric

[Chris Smith]

Does anyone have an idea of how much of an issue this is? I'm working on an update to one of my apps that would start using GPS ads instead of the older admob.jar integration. Should I release while this bug is still out there? Or should I hold off for a few weeks? 

Chris 

[Christer Nordvik]

Hi. 

Is the fix in this version? 

http://android-developers.blogspot.no/2014/01/google-play-services-41.html

So we can now safely add the adView.destroy() back again when it is rolled out?

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

No, it'll be in the next one. The next one is coming much relatively much quicker than the time difference between 4.0 and 4.1 though.

[Christer Nordvik]

So this one? :-) 

http://android-developers.blogspot.no/2014/02/google-play-services-42.html

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Yep. Fingers crossed that this version fixes it! It rolls out more broadly this week.