I Initialized Ads Before Restoring Purchases, and Paying Users Saw a Banner Flash — Cold-Start Ordering for Rork (Expo) Apps
Consent, ATT, ad SDK init, purchase restore, and remote config all try to run in the same few hundred milliseconds at launch. Get the order wrong and a paying user sees a banner flash, or measurement fires before consent in the EEA. Here is how I fold a Rork-generated Expo app's startup into a single orchestrator and kill the races by design.
The Day a Third Reason to Hide Ads Appeared — Folding Rork App Ad-Free Logic Into One Place
Ads show only on one screen for paying users, or ads never show for free users. The usual cause is that the condition for hiding ads is scattered across the code. Here is how I fold three reasons — subscription, lifetime purchase, and a timed reward unlock — into a single state and route every ad through one hook, written as an implementation note from running six apps as an indie developer.
Getting to the Real Revenue Number — A Pipeline that Reconciles AdMob, App Store, Google Play, and Stripe
Dashboard revenue and the money that actually lands in your account do not match. Here is an aggregation pipeline that absorbs currency, timezone, and the gap between estimated and finalized figures across four revenue sources — with the implementation and operating judgment from running six apps.
Expanding AdMob bidding demand without adding SDKs — what applying to 11 server-side partners taught me about 'enabled ≠ serving'
A working log of actually adding SDK-free, server-side bidding partners to AdMob's bidding sources: the difference between doc-type and form-type sign-up flows, how reCAPTCHA behaves, and the trap that 'partnership enabled' does not mean 'eligible to serve', told from a solo developer's point of view.
Your Rork iOS App Won't Build After Adding AdMob Mediation — Untangling Linker Errors and No-Fill Ads
Added Unity Ads, Liftoff, or InMobi mediation adapters to your Rork/Expo iOS app and suddenly hit ld linker errors or ads that never fill? Here's how to isolate the cause by symptom and fix each layer.
Measuring the Real eCPM Yourself: Piping Impression-Level Ad Revenue Into Your Own Analytics
The AdMob dashboard's average eCPM hides which regions and placements actually earn. Here is how I capture per-impression revenue with paidEventListener, normalize it, and pipe it into my own analytics to compute a real eCPM by network, placement, and country.
Managing Startup Time as a Budget: How I Deferred SDK Init Across Six Apps
Instead of optimizing startup ad hoc, I switched to allocating a per-phase time budget and defending it. Here's how I deferred SDK init across six Rork-built apps and added a CI gate that fails the build when the budget is exceeded.
Retuning AdMob Mediation Priorities: Notes From Trying to Lift My eCPM
A running log of how I manually revisited the network priorities in my AdMob mediation setup to lift eCPM on an indie wallpaper app, what changed compared to leaving it on auto-optimization, and what I noticed along the way.
Running Crash-Free Rate as a Budget: An SLO Design Note for Deciding Where to Invest Across 6 Indie Apps
Notes from running 6 wallpaper apps in parallel and the shift from treating crash-free rate as a pass/fail threshold to treating it as an error budget. A working write-up on turning burn rate into investment and sunset decisions.
Taking Inventory of Your AdMob Ad Units — All the Way to App Open Cooldown Design
When rewarded and interstitial units pile up and you can no longer tell which one fires on which screen, here is the inventory process I use, plus the design for adding a cooldown to an App Open ad that otherwise shows on every launch.
Managing Native Settings Across Rork-Exported Apps with a Custom Expo Config Plugin
Tired of re-typing your AdMob ID and ATT string every time prebuild wipes your Info.plist? Here is how I made native settings reproducible with a custom Expo config plugin and shared it across six wallpaper apps.
Two Weeks After Adding Pangle and Mintegral to My AdMob Waterfall — Notes on eCPM and Fill Rate
A record from a wallpaper app with over 50 million downloads: I added Pangle and Mintegral to my AdMob mediation, then compared two weeks of eCPM and fill-rate data. Bidding-and-waterfall coexistence, the effective-revenue breakdown, region-based groups, and a daily monitoring script — kept in a form you can actually operate.