Ad performance issues on low-end devices

[Maciej Ejsmont]

Hi,

Since the release of out android game we have been experiencing a lot of ANR errors (about 3% of installs), which we have identified to be related to the Admob SDK. The game is made with Unity (editor version 22.3.16f1) and uses Google Mobile Ads plugin version 9.1.0. 

We were able to reproduce the issue on one of our devices and found out that the crashes frequently happen upon showing an ad. When an ad is to be shown the game often gets laggy and freezes for a few seconds before showing the ad, which itself is often really laggy when playing. Most of the time you can close the ad afterwards, wait some time for the game to unfreeze and endure the lags if you are patient enough. The game will sometimes crash, but most of the time not. The biggest problem arises when the ad shows the play store bottom sheet of the advertised game at the end of it's playtime. When these types of ads appear, the app always black-screens, minimizes, and shows the play store bottom sheet, when the player is already on the home screen. When trying to go back to the app, it always starts fresh. Android logcat doesn't show any errors.

We've tried changing the Unity Editor version or the plugin version, but the issue still persists. We've also tried removing all of the mediation adapters, but it also doesn't improve anything. The issue happens only on low-end, cheap devices, but when no ad is shown, the game runs smoothly and doesn't crash by itself.

[Mobile Ads SDK Forum Advisor]

Hi,

It is always recommended to enable the Optimize initialization and ad loading inorder to enhance the overall responsiveness of ads and help prevent “Application Not Responding" (ANR) errors on your app. Can you please confirm whether the issue is reproducible in our Google sample project?

Kindly share below details via reply to author option to do further investigation:

• app ID
• ad unit ID
• Stack trace
• Device information

 

This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!5004Q02vFqse:ref" (ADR-00267135)

Thanks,
 

Mobile Ads SDK Team

[Mobile Ads SDK Forum Advisor]

Hi,

Thank you for providing the requested information.

Upon checking the stack trace, I can confirm that the report doesn't contain anything related to Mobile Ads SDK. 

It is hard to validate the ANR issue without having a com.google.android.gms.ads symbol and from the stack trace it is unclear the origin of the issue. Could you try once by updating the SDK and check whether you are experiencing the same issue or not? In case you found anything related to SDK then kindly write to us again.