Hey, Have You Heard?
As Good Vibes continues to make progress on becoming an app used by many, the costs of the upkeep for the server and database will also continue to rise, as slow as it may be. Google has a neat little thing called AdMob, which allows users to implement ads into their apps and gain money from people using the app. Ads only give however many cents, but as the userbase increases and more people use the app, the more the money will accumulate. This past week I was tasked with implementing ads into Good Vibes so we could make a little money and be able to help with the costs of maintaining the app.
Though it sounds easy, implementing it was a much harder task than anticipated. The Google Ads SDK must be initialized before the app is run or else there would be a RunTime error. Google Ads also has different types of ads, such as Banners and Native ads, all of which have different properties and are initialized in different ways. While following the tutorial, they used a Provider.value in the runApp function (which runs the app) and used an instance of ad initialization. Basically, the ad was instantialized and was able to be used anywhere in the app, or so I thought. Since the app used a ChangeNotifierProvider, a subclass of Provider that allowed listeners to be used so the app could change data in real time, a MultiProvider needed to be used. After trying to use the Provider.value and do a dependency check before initializing the banner ad, a ProviderNotFoundException kept on popping up and I could not find a solution to it no matter how hard I tried.
Eventually I was able to find a simpler implementation for the ads that did not require another Provider. I was not able to implement it before our weekly Wednesday meeting (since I found the solution during the meeting) but the fix should be simple enough. This upcoming week will be about finishing the ad task and potentially creating more analysis vectors for Firebase Analytics. A busy week perfect for Fall Break…