More or less accidentaly I've found out today, that there is a new AdMob SDK around which finally has some useful features for me :-)

I was always struggling with the different screen sizes and working out a way to display the right ad size to it. That's induced a lot of coding work and also some hard try'n'error hours.

Well, Robo Miner is some kind of special case, because it is landscape and does RELY on the fact, that the ad does not fill the whole width of the screen - which normally was a bad thing with admob, because they just had no ads in the right dimensions.

My game Sholik did that quite differently, because that game is also landscape and there it is the best when the ad fills the whole width of it. So there was other approches used to get it right.

The latest SDK from AdMob does come with a new approach in those concerns, they now introduced a "SMART BANNER" - kinda nice!
The idea is, that this banner does look itself about the right size to display ads and just uses an appropriate format.

I had just implemented that new AdSize in one of my game (released very very soon!) and can tell you, that it works pretty well.

But there is still the Problem of what happens, when no ad is displayed. for example, when there is no internet connection available... It would be so easy to just let me define a background placeholder for this situation or maybe my own banner which I can deliver inside the apk.

I wonder, that noone had that idea yet. It would be very beautiful to just inklude my own banners in the apk which gets displayed automatically, when admob is not able to retrieve any ad.

Until than I am using my own approach for that situation, which does work well, but was a bit of work until everythink was working fine and it is still complicated to show normal ads again, in case connection is available again during the gameplay.

Obviously it is not very hard to do, it's just annoying to invest that much time in things, which are not related to the actual game :-)