Bug: On Vungle/Liftoff adapter, it takes 30 seconds to be initialized via MobileAds.initialize

[AndroidDeveloperLB]

trafficstars

As the title says. This happens only on this version:

implementation("com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads:23.6.0")

implementation("com.google.ads.mediation:vungle:7.4.3.0")

But it doesn't occur on 7.4.2.0.

For comparison, this is what I get in ms from the other ad-sources:

• Admob: 16
• Vungle : 30003
• Chartboost: 393
• IronSource: 1378
• Applovin: 2128
• Mintegral: 168
• InMobi: 473

Even 2 seconds is a lot, but 30 seconds?!

This means that for 30 seconds, I can't load a single ad yet...

Note that this occurs on a real app-id too, and not just sample app-id of Admob.

Attached sample here:

NativeAdvancedExample.zip

You will probably want to change the admob-app-id to have proper statistics about each of them.

[AndroidDeveloperLB]

It seems to occur now for Unity ads too, and so it seems it's the behavior of errors on such SDKs in general: https://github.com/googleads/googleads-mobile-android-mediation/issues/558

What I suggest is:

1. Before publishing a new version, test it
2. Communicate with the ad-networks you support and tell them about issues, to solve together
3. Allow us to disable specific ad-networks in code, so that we could do it using remote-configs, for example.
4. Allow us to have a timeout of our own for MobileAds.initialize , so that the mediation will use what was initialized so far, and ignore those that didn't finish yet. No reason that one issue of some ad-network would punish all the rest...

[AndroidDeveloperLB]

It seems that at least for the case of Vungle/Liftoff, I had an issue on the mapping on Admob website, where a space character (" ") was added to the end of the app-id , so it caused an issue to the adapter in the app itself.

This shouldn't occur. First, the Admob website should have some rules of the content, for validation and warnings/errors. Second, in code, it should be possible to detect such issues right in the MobileAds.initialize, and not just "timeout". If the mapping is incorrect, it should tell us about it. Not reach 30 seconds of initialization.