Developer Anchubby

One day, all the ads in my K-Pop Sudoku app suddenly stopped working. The day before, everything had been working normally. But when I tested the app again, the banner area was empty, and the rewarded ad button remained disabled because the ad had not loaded. I had not changed the code or installed any new packages. Banner, interstitial, and rewarded ads had all been working before, so I initially had no idea what had gone wrong. In this post, I will share how I investigated the problem, created a minimal test app, compared the error logs, and eventually got the ads working again. My development environment The project used the following environment: Expo SDK: 54.0.23 React Native: 0.81.5 react-native-google-mobile-ads : 16.0.0 Expo bare workflow, using the TypeScript template and npx expo prebuild The screenshot below shows what I saw when the ads stopped working.  Banner area empty, rewarded ads not loaded (if not loaded, gray inactivated button)  Starting with the obvious c...

While developing and debugging my K-Pop Sudoku app, I implemented a hint feature that lets users reveal one hidden Sudoku number after watching a rewarded ad. The app was built with Expo's bare workflow and React Native. I used react-native-google-mobile-ads to integrate Google AdMob rewarded ads. The basic idea was straightforward: when a user taps the Watch Ad button in the hint modal, the app displays a rewarded ad. After the user earns the reward, the hint modal closes and one randomly selected empty cell reveals its correct Sudoku number. However, getting this flow to work reliably took more debugging than I expected. I encountered two main problems: the first reward was not applied correctly, and the rewarded ad instance needed to be recreated before another ad could be shown. My development environment This was the environment I used for the project: Expo SDK: 54.0.23 React Native: 0.81.5 react-native-google-mobile-ads : 16.0.0 Expo bare workflow, using the TypeScript temp...