When Is Revmob Sdk For Corona Going To Support The Latest Build

RevMob
#281

@DavidRangel

I am absolutely not pleased with your answer, for multiple reasons:

This is the first time I hear from RevMob about any issue they have had with Corona and the identifiers we provide. I know for a fact that no one on the team has heard about this either.

Are you really arguing that you did NOT investigate this issue because you did NOT hear from the RevMob guys personally that there is a problem? So hundreds of corona users having problems with RevMob is NOT enough for you to contact RevMob and seek out a solution? You wait until RevMob contacts YOU?

As you all know, we have been very clear about what identifiers we provide and which ones we have deprecated - and it has all been driven by changes in the industry and decisions by Apple. These have not been arbitrary decisions by Corona Labs.

 How come all the other platforms (like Jan mentioned) offered information about the MAC address and made the RevMob transition possible? The argument that you do what “Apple and the industry” decide does not help anything if the result is that it is of no use for you users. Making “arbitrary” decisions can be more sensible at times, so please don’t try to hide behind “apple and the industry”.

In fact, I don’t think any Corona developers, nor any of our *actual* monetization partners, have had any issues with this.

The corona community has been desparately asking for MORE monetization options for YEARS now. I understand that you have different priorities than your users. So now the RevMob guys take the time to create a 3rd party lib for Corona, giving YOUR users what they originally wanted from YOU, and now you tell them that they are not an *actual* monetization partner and therefore do not deserve your attention? This is unbelievable.

QUOTE: Furthermore, the last changes we did around this happened weeks ago. 

It seems like you did not really understand what was the problem from a technical point of view. The problem was NOT that you did not provide the IDFA, but that you did NOT provide the MAC address.

The problems with the RevMob integration have been around for a very long time, and I just cant understand why the two of you (corona and revmob) did not work together to sort it all out. Everyone is trying to put the blame on the other side.

It also took ages until the iAd integration was done (I wrote a dozen emails to both corona AND inneractive). It felt like corona and inneractive never really got contact to work together.

People want to make money with their apps, so they need monetization options more than a new, faster rendering engine or 2.5D. I feel like corona is making the wrong decisions on what to focus, and it gets worse day by day. The unique selling point  in my opinion of corona was and is still the ease of use. You should try to build up on THAT feature and make monetization as easy as loading images or playing sounds, instead of trying to get anywhere close to Unity when it comes to graphical capabilities.

#282

Matthias - Thanks for the post. Let me be clear - I am not trying to blame anyone for anything. Now, lets separate out your concerns:

  1. Lack of monetization options - I hear you. This is true and I have not denied it. That is starting to change - we now have:

  • sponsorpay

  • tap for tap

  • inneractive

  • inmobi

  • admob

  • iads

and more are coming soon.

So, again, I understand your concerns here. I wish it were as easy as just waving a wand and instantly having more options, but it isn’t. But it is getting much better.

  1. Providing identifiers like the MAC address - We, like everyone else, have been trying to figure out what is the best thing to do here. We want to provide options, but we also want to be sensitive to what methods may or may not be usable now or in the future. You may not see it, but the minute that one identifier becomes “illegal”, we get tons of pressure from developers on why/why not we allow it, etc. etc.

But this brings me to the 3rd point…

  1. Revmob’s issues - Today is the first time that I’ve heard that Revmob had an issue, and that’s only because I happened to see and click on Jan’s post. Revmob is not an official partner (although they are welcome to use our forums), so there is no way I can stay in top of what issues they may be having, especially if they dont tell us about it.

As I said in my post, Jan has my address and is welcome to email me anytime and tell me if there is some issue they are having and if we can do anything about it. But they haven’t. So what I’m saying is that saying their issues are due to Corona is not really fair. None of the other ad networks have had that issue. And when there has been an issue, we have been quick to act on it: in fact, we went out of our way to remove inneractive on iOS temporarily so that we wouldn’t risk having our developers get rejected by Apple. 

So that’s the deal. Again, I did not blame Revmob. I asked that they communicate with us if they are having an issue instead of just posting, weeks later, in our forums saying that x or y is our fault. That’s all.

David

#283

finally someone saying that;)

#284

@David

This is Corona official statement ? “This is not our fault ?”

@Jan

This is Revmob official statement ? “This is not our fault ?”

Corona devs were told that 1095 + 5.2.1 combo WORKS, when it does NOT based on people were saying. I don’t care whose fault it was frankly, but do not tell people that something works when it does not. Do not tell people that you had no idea about it when dozens of people are writing about it on your forum.

There should be clear statement that “there are some issues with current version of our SDK, please use stable version for best performance. You will be noticed when problems are solved” or something like this.

Guys, please provide ETA when it will be stable to use with 100 or near 100% installs detection. That is all we need.

PS: I must admit i found some installs this week, so maybe problem is solved now.

My 2 cents.

Tom

#285

Bladko - I am NOT saying “this is not our fault” to anything :slight_smile:

I AM saying: this is the first I hear about it and I dont think it’s fair for us to be called out when no one even asked us a question about this. We have not had any complaints from developers or partners about this. As far as I knew until today, this was a non-issue. That is my point.

As I said in my first post - my email is david@coronalabs. Anyone is free to email me if they are having a problem and seeing what we can do about it. Posting in the forums that something is Corona’s problem, when we didn’t know about it, is not very fair.

#286

@David

This is called “support via Forum” and as far i remember this was a part of Indie / Pro Contract some time ago. There were one special person to do this job some time ago and it worked perfectly.

I have not received on my email anything about problem with installs due to UDID drop. This means problem does not exist ? Now look how stupid this sentence look from customer perspective :slight_smile:

Maybe this is a good reason to improve customer support because bug system is very heavy and slow and you do not replay to problems on forum as a general rule (sometimes you do, sometimes you do not). I have reported one bug with widget and have no idea what is going on with it.

I was one of first Revmob beta testers in 2012 and i really loved Gui close and quick customer feedback, regardless of my apps revenue, which is rather very low :slight_smile: Everything works great until UDID issue.

Tom

#287

One of our new iOS games that was launched earlier this month first used Revmob SDK 5.1.0 (hashed MAC) then upgraded to 5.2.1 (IDFA). Both versions were plagued with Revmob’s bug of reporting 0 installs, up until this week, in which IDFA is apparently finally working.

During this time in which Revmob was broken, our game created 300,000+ impressions, generated 35000+ clicks, but got credited for 0 installs. That’s a lot of lost revenue for three weeks.

From my point of view, the blame falls mostly on Revmob, for the following reasons:

  1. Revmob published the 5.1.0 and the 5.2.1 SDK’s. They are ultimately responsible for developing and testing their SDKs.

  2. Revmob’s communication during this period of time has been abysmal. Their latest post acknowledges this.

  3. It doesn’t make sense that the IDFA version of Revmob’s SDK wasn’t working before this week. Revmob claims it now works, but there’s no reason that it shouldn’t have worked from the outset. That’s clearly a Revmob backend problem, not a Corona problem.

  4. Revmob should use historical eCPM data to retroactively reimburse us, but I haven’t heard that they are doing this.

Sure, could Corona have been quicker in implementing IDFA so that both developers and SDK providers could have had more time preparing and testing it?  Probably.  But ultimately, it’s Revmob who released broken SDK’s without having sufficiently tested them.  And, unfortunately, we Corona developers are the ones to bear the burden in terms of wasted effort and lost revenue.

#288

@Poon,

i have released 14 apps during first week of May in Appstore, all with broken Revmob SDK (they told that its working). Please tell me who can i sue now ? :slight_smile:

  1. This is true, revmob should use historical data to pay us this lost time… unless there are only new app IDs ? :frowning:

Tom

#289

Bladko,

Sorry, but I strongly disagree on 2 things:

  1. 3rd party library support: There is no way we can support 3rd party libraries, on the forum or otherwise. How can we give support for code we didn’t write, don’t know and don’t have access to? So, no, we cannot support developers in their problems with RevMob.

For reference, there are lots of other 3rd party tools/libraries for Corona (e.g., Outlaw, Glider, Million Tile Engine, etc.). None of those guys expect us to do support for them, and we don’t. And, I’ve been in communication with many of them in the past - they are free to ask us questions and bring up issues. And if we can help, we do. This is very different from what happened here.

  1. General forum support: Saying we do not reply to problems in the forum is flat out false. Rob and Brent spend a TON of time helping wherever possible in the forums. And our responsiveness in the forums has never been better. That’s just a fact.

Can we respond to everyone, about everything, right away? Nope. That’s not possible. But you won’t get support like that anywhere, unless you pay for it. Custom, immediate support is not free.

In any case, I understand your frustration with this whole situation. I really do. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to help with it.

David

#290

Hey everyone - I just deleted a post from a well known troll. Just FYI.

#291

@David

I am not frustrated. I am a disappointed customer. I am not reading this thread to get “I am sorry i cannot help you” but to get ETA for final fix. Everything else is secondary. Over and out.

Tom

#292

Understood. Then lets just wait for the Revmob guys to respond. Unfortunately it’s not something we (CL) can help with.

#293

Hi Egarayblas:

  I suggest you upload your app with new update first ( Make sure use new sdk with IDFA support ).

Anyway , I think this month is better then last month .

#294

Hi RevMob & fellow developers,

As a UK developer I integrated a “Free Game” button into my app. When I downloaded my app to my own device and touched the “Free Game” button I got this:

RevMob.png

It’s rather worrying as this appears to me to be potentially lost revenue…

#295

That might has well been a 404.
My app is growing installs now that it’s got a little bit of traffic on the store. About 1 installs per 150 clicks.
I think somebody already guessed that the iPhone 5 running the latest os don’t post installs. Seeming that’s probably 60% of that active market to us. But only 5% of revenue to revmob. This is a huge loss to the developer of actual rev.
It’s up to Revmob to fix or better force the advertiser to use the latest s2s protocols and stop being so damn careless with our livelihood.

#296

I’m starting to see some installs now. Not quite as many as I used to, but more than zero (which is what I’ve been getting over the past weeks). Using Corona 1127 and Revmob 5.2.1.

#297

Could you clarify the iphone 5 comment. Is this something revmob is aware off? 

#298

I think I have this figured out (with a little experimentation of course).

RevMob is in the middle of a transition right now. They have tons of apps from pre-May 1st. These apps report UDID but not IDFA. The rest (newer ones) report IDFA.

The app RevMob is advertising within YOUR app must use the same identifier (UDID or IDFA) in order for you to receive credit on the install. If YOUR app is UDID and the advertised app is IDFA, or vice versa, RevMob will not get credit for the install because they cannot confirm it, and neither will you. It’s pretty much giving away a freebie.

There’s nothing RevMob can do to 100% fix this situation right now, but iOS 7 does not transmit UDID or Mac Address, EVEN if the app is compiled for iOS 6 and below. So in the fall ALL apps will have to transition in order to use RevMob. 

In the meantime, the best fix I could see is RevMob could stop delivering ads based on the RevMob SDK version. If the SDK version is too low, you won’t advertise IDFA apps, if the SDK version is new, you won’t advertise UDID apps. 

Anyway, we’ll probably just have to tough it out until iOS 7 releases. (And I doubt we’ll ever get credit for iOS 5 installs ever again)

#299

Great post Puzzle Runner.  I’ve been thinking along similar lines myself, though I never did the experiments that you did to try to prove it out.

I’m thinking that this is only really a problem for advertised apps that are still using UDID, i.e., that haven’t released an App Store update since the UDID ban went into effect.  When a user clicks an ad for such a “grandfathered” app, and the app gets installed, the app will report to RevMob the installation based on UDID.  RevMob won’t be able to correlate that install with the app that displayed the ad, which will have reported the click based on IDFA or the MAC address.

But, for advertised apps that aren’t using UDID, i.e., that were released or updated since the UDID ban started, when a user clicks on an ad for it and installs it, it’ll report to RevMob the installation based on IDFA for iOS 6 or MAC address for iOS 5.  That should correlate with what the app that displayed the ad reported, so the install should be trackable.

In any case, other CPA ad networks are going to face similar challenges, not just RevMob.

I’ve also thought about the possibility, but I haven’t tested it, that the MAC address hashing isn’t working, in which case no iOS 5 installs would be trackable.  When Corona provides the MAC address via system.getInfo(“deviceID”) (which is what the RevMob SDK uses on iOS 5), it applies the MD5 hash.  I don’t know whether it’s applied directly to the raw bytes or to a string representation of the address (with colons).  If it happens to be done one way in that API, but the native RevMob iOS SDK does it a different way, then the hashes won’t match, and no iOS 5 installs would be tracked.  Again, I haven’t tested this, it was just another way I could potentially see install tracking failing to work.

  • Andrew

P.S.: I’ve just tested and found that system.getInfo(“deviceID”) hashes the MAC address in string form, using capital letters, without any colon or dash separator.  I’m not able to tell what the native RevMob iOS SDK does, but according to the changelog (http://sdk.revmob.com/ios_download.html), they only started “encrypting” (hashing) the address a few weeks ago, on 22-May.  Either way, it’s quite possible that they format the address differently, or use the raw bytes, before hashing, in which case they’ll get a different result.

#300

I have do some test on RevMob and some CPI base ads providers .

 Regarding iOS5 . they all have the same problem . They can not trace correctly .

Because iOS5 do not support IDFA . But now App should use IDFA only.

  Good ads provider should not send ads to iOS5 device .

 iOS6 have a little confuse . Because it support both UDID and IDFA . so , it would be have some missing  data. especially in Corona SDK . because Corona support IDFA almost in the end of May. Developer is hard to support UDID and IDFA both .

 If it support IDFA before replace UDID for hash MAC.  I think RevMob can record to mapping IDFA and UDID .

So , that’s why it seem only happen data missing on Corona SDK .

  in iOS7 , I do not do any testing .