Anyone got mobile ads working on any platform with latest Monogame?

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So in addition to the problems Iā€™ve hit with the latest Monogame (detailed here), Iā€™ve now come across a roadblock - I spent a large chunk of this weekend gone attempting to intergrate ads into my latest project, but nothing seemed to work.

For Windows Phone 8.1, Iā€™ve tried Adrotator, Pubcenter and Vserv Adwrapper - Adrotator built but did not display ads, the Pubcenter tutorial (found here) refers to adding a connected service that appears not to be available, and from what I can see, WP8.1 projects donā€™t build XAP files, which are required by Vserv.

I also looked at Admob, but this doesnā€™t support WP8.1, so I would need to downgrade to WP8.0, which would mean going back to my old dev PC (as I canā€™t seem to get any version of the WP8.0 template working on my new box) - not ideal.

For Android, I tried Admob and Vserv again. The Vserv-adwrapped version of the apk file crashed on running, while adding the Xamarin Google Play Services to my application caused the build to throw ā€œError: No resource found that matches the given name: attr ā€˜android:actionModeShareDrawableā€™ā€ errors in several places.

I could possibley go back to my old implementation of Admob - referencing the admob DLL via a java wrapper - but this would require legacy ad unit IDs in admob, so I would have to point my new game at the ad unit ID of one of my older ones, and Iā€™m not sure how kindly Google would take to this!

Iā€™ve emailed various people where appropriate in order to try and find out more, but I was wondering if anyone had had similar issues and if/how they resolved it - or if there were any alternative ad providers that anyone has managed to get up and running?

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I have AdMob on Android working correctly with the latest MonoGame.

Check you have the latest Android SDK installed and try build against it, I have a bunch of problems getting Google Play Services to build in my app and I think that fixed them.

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@daveleaver Got Play services working in a test app thanks to some support from Xamarin - how did you position the banner ad over the Monogame game display?

As for WP8, it looks like Iā€™m just going to have to bite the bullet and downgrade to WP8 - as well as not being able to get ads working (and having succeeded in getting admob working on WP8), the sporadic freeze-on-touch bug Iā€™ve been getting on WP8.1 means I canā€™t be confident releasing yet.

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Roughly like this

Dump of code from my app:

Call CreateAndSetContentView to set it up, then Update to toggle visiblility.
Only TopCenter is implemented as you can see :smile:

I set it up in Program.cs like this:

var g = new Game1();
var view = (Android.Views.View)g.Services.GetService(typeof(Android.Views.View));
AdManager.CreateAndSetContentView(this, view, AdUnitId, TestDeviceIds);
g.Run();
1 Like
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@daveleaver Up and running on Android! Thanks so much!

Just one little glitch to resolve - at the moment, it takes about a minute for the first ad to load, but Iā€™m hoping to be able to fiddle with the settings in order to vastly reduce the refresh time until the display starts.

On the Windows Phone side, Iā€™ve downgraded back to WP8.0 - not only does this allow me to use Admob, but also resolves various uncertainties and issues I was having with 8.1, and also means that I have a universal codebase between platforms, which was not possible on WP8.1 thanks to the removal of IsolatedStorage.

Next stop - iOS!

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Cool, glad that helped.

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Hi @daveleaver, I was trying to integrate AdMob into my MG Android project following your code example, but apparently it is not working with the latest MG source. I mentioned the error in this post:

I wonder if there is any chance that you help look into this issue? Thanks very much! :smile: