Announcing New Google Mobile Ads SDKs: 4.4 for Google Play Services and 6.9.2 for iOS

Today, we’re excited to announce a new release to both our Android and iOS Google Mobile Ads SDKs. The key new features added in these releases are in-app purchase ads for both platforms and new mediation APIs for Android.

In-App Purchase Ads

In this release we’ve added SDK-level support (front-end support coming soon!) for running house ads that can initiate an in-app purchase. In-app purchase ads require that you set an in-app purchase listener on your interstitial ad. If an in-app purchase ad is shown, it will present the user with an option to buy one or more items that you have configured:

When the user clicks Buy now, the SDK will invoke your in-app purchase listener with the purchase information necessary to start a transaction for that product. You are responsible for implementing the in-app purchase flow from this point. Full implementation details can be found in our Android and iOS documentation.

Note: Front-end support for this feature is not available yet, but is coming soon.

New Mediation APIs

As part of our Google Play services API revamp, we’ve added new mediation APIs (which we’re calling mediation v2) to make it easier for ad networks to create mediation adapters.

Don’t worry! We’re still supporting mediation adapters written against mediation v1 APIs. This change won’t require any immediate updates to your apps.

If you previously passed extra parameters to third party networks, note that this process has changed for mediation v2. You’ll now pass a bundle to the ad network, keyed by its mediation v2 adapter class. Here is an example of passing extra parameters to AdMob:


Bundle adMobBundle = new Bundle();
adMobBundle.putString("color_bg", "AAAAFF");
AdRequest request = new AdRequest.Builder()
    .addNetworkExtrasBundle(AdMobAdapter.class, adMobBundle)
    .build();

You can also use this snippet to check for the existence of mediation v2 support. If this snippet compiles, then the adapter supports mediation v2. If there is a compilation error saying that the arguments don’t match the arguments for addNetworkExtrasBundle(Class, Bundle), then that adapter class does not support mediation v2.

See the documentation for more information on passing parameters to mediation v2.

Dropped Support for iOS 4.3

The 6.9.2 iOS SDK release has dropped support for iOS 4.3. By dropping iOS 4.3, the SDK can take advantage of automatic reference counting (ARC) weak references to provide a more stable release. The SDK still supports iOS 5.0 and above.

Check out the downloads page to grab the latest iOS release. A new Google Play services revision will soon be available in Android’s SDK Manager.

For a full list of SDK changes, see the release notes. If you have any technical questions about these changes, we’re available on the forum. Finally, stay tuned for an update on front-end support for in-app purchase ads on our Google+ page.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations