Should I put iAd to my iOS apps on iTunes App store? Should I put the google adsense back to my blog? The reason I am asking this question is: while personally I really don’t like the ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, or the iAds on some apps like Echofon, I understand this is a meaningful way for app developers to make some money. This applies to me as well. While I did not spend whole a lot time working on my apps (in aggregate), I cannot go on this app dev road without any meaningful downloads/income revenue forever. I can do it for a while. But not for too long. I believe Ray Wenderlich talked about the importance of Ad revenue at recent raywenderlich.com podcast. One of the episode of Paul Kemp’s the App Guy Podcast (onemob.com) , talked about something similar.
I guess, the trick is to balance the ads and app. We don’t want ads to totally destroy the good experience of an app, but at the same time, if the app revenue could help the developer keep going, go for it. We live in a commercial world, no money, no bread. No bread, how can app developers survive?
Btw, I found the Apple developer documentation for iAd is insufficient or not up-to-date. For example, it uses requiredContentSizeIdentifiers in the tutorial, which is already deprecated in iOS 6. I found it won’t compile with iOS 7 SDK. I have seen in the past Apple does not always updates its developer documentation. Maybe they have not given high priority to this. I am sure if they pay attention, they can fix it.
