10 September 2011

Poor fill rate for Asia, sadly

While working on AIR's UserAgent bug, I noticed a LOT of Korean are actually playing my games...

It's a good news and I'm happy I recently was able to sign an agreement with a korean market to distribute Penguinoid.

The bad news is I'm currrently not winning a penny from Korea : the several ads network I use don't support Korea or very poorly ( 1 or 2% fill rate, even with a working user agent )

He! Advertisers! What are you doing ?! I could tell you korean are using Android a lot RIGHT NOW!
And it seems Taiwan is coming too....

Learn Dari on Android thanks to AIR

Some weeks again, I finished an app I personnaly use : Dari AlefBe
This app help you to learn the Dari's alphabet.
What is Dari ? Wrongly called Farsi or persian, tt's one of the 2 main languages in Afghanistan.
Mainly in the north part of Afghanistan, including Kabul.

This app was made using Flex 4.5 and its mobile version.
It's my first app using Flex for mobile since my games use pure AS3.
I must say I'm not totally happy with Flex 4.5 Mobile.
The way they defined the skins according dpi, the default navigator, the buggy BACK key handling are some of the reasons why I not totally like it. I probably blog about these soon.
You could also add the fact they changed the defaut mobile skin from the beta : it is no longer Android-like, so I had to redefine almost every skin of the component I used.
Hopefully, gesture and effects are working very well. It was easy to make the Flash Cards !

How to (not) win money with AIR for mobile

Last week, I analized the ads fill rate for my games on several market.
I was very surprised to find a poor 8% max for my Android games while almost 25% for the WillNa website and Poulpytris Flash Lite.

So I tried to find the difference, using my own ads request log....and found it:
This is the UserAgent I receive from some guys on Poulpytris
 mozilla/5.0 (android; u; en-us) applewebkit/531.9 (khtml, like gecko) adobeair/2.7
When you look first, nothing strange...but then I looked at my log about WillNa.com and found this one
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

Well, it seems there is a lot of differences, no ?
For whatever reason, AIR use its own UserAgent.
It wouldn't be a problem if it didn't use a partial UserAgent!
In AIR default UserAgent, no android version, no device ID.
These 2 points are a MAJOR problem when you monetize your app throught ads : Ads network use these info to give you the ads ! No info, no ads or a basic one times to times.

Hopefully, there is a solution : you can override the defaut UserAgent with URLRequestDefaults.userAgent = newUA;
Now, we need to find a solution to detect the AndroidOS version and device ID.
And again, AIR failed to help us to make money : there is NO way to get these values using AS3 !

After some googleing, I find someone who made a fantastic discovery : these values are available on an .ini file !
Using his NativeDeviceInfo class, I updated my apps everywhere, hoping users will update them quickly.

It's been a week and about half of them update it.
For them, I saw a BIG increase of the ads fill rate which confirm the problem's origin : user agent !

A big thanks to Sidney for his class so !
and another buggy feature for AIR to report, helas ...