AdMob crashing Windows Phone apps. What is the alternative?

Not long ago I’ve published my first app using the devcenter developer account and not the global publisher — and just a couple of days later (or should I say weeks) I started noticing crash reports for my app. Downloaded the stack trace data in hope that I could find out where the issue was but no luck — it gave me almost no info about the cause. All I know is that it has something to do with the browser.

So here is my stack trace:

Frame    Image             Function                                                   Offset
0        coredll.dll       xxx_RaiseException                                         19
1        mscoree3_7.dll                                                               436172
2        mscoree3_7.dll                                                               383681
3        mscoree3_7.dll                                                               540620
4                          TransitionStub                                             0
5                          Microsoft.Phone.Controls.NativeMethods.ValidateHResult     236
6                          Microsoft.Phone.Controls.WebBrowserInterop.InvokeScript    128
7                          Microsoft.Phone.Controls.WebBrowser.InvokeScript           84
8                          .__c__DisplayClass36._RunScripts_b__34                     228
9        mscoree3_7.dll                                                               428848
10       mscoree3_7.dll                                                               222523
11       mscoree3_7.dll                                                               221143
12                         System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke         112
13                         System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke         1556
14                         System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke                        104
15                         System.Delegate.DynamicInvokeOne                           564
16                         System.MulticastDelegate.DynamicInvokeImpl                 84
17                         System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherOperation.Invoke        80
18                         System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Dispatch               404
19                         System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.OnInvoke               56

So my next question was: which part of my app uses the web browser? Answer: none. Except for the advertising part, that is. And that’s where AdMob comes into play. A few searches later I found out that I’m not the only one with this problem — there are lots of developers out there with similar stack traces, all using AdMob for displaying ads.

Even the AdMob Google group is full of this kind of issues and crashes — and yet they do nothing to solve them. There are some workarounds for this — like marking the unhandled exception as handled and preventing the app from crashing — but that will also render the advertisements unclickable, which is not desirable.

So I started looking at alternatives — and after a while I ended up with InnerActive. Most of the developers seem to recommend this one as an alternative to Microsoft’s Pub Center and AdMob — and from what I’ve seen they have some nice partnerships with well-known publishers like HalfBrick or ZeptoLab. And I will give them a try.

I’ve already looked at their documentation a bit and at their supported types of ads — and they seem to be all right (in any case, a lot better than AdMob). I will integrate their ads into one of my apps and let you know how it goes.