Yes, we know, the developer needs to make some money.
Being a developer myself, I can understand the idea of monetary gain for your work. We all have to eat, clothe and have a roof over our heads.
What I don’t understand, and never will, is the idea that monetary gain is first and foremost in some developer’s minds. I can see the whiteboard sketches in my head, and here we’ll leave some pixel space for the ever present rotating ads.
Which brings me to why I try once and uninstall apps on too frequent a basis. If your game app shows me an ad on the playing surface, which distracts from my concentration, it gets trashed, no matter how well it plays. Ads anywhere else, on menus, option pages and score tally pages are acceptable, no harm, no foul.
What makes a tablet or phone unique, from a laptop or a desktop computer, is limited screen real estate. A beautifully rendered game surface goes to trash as soon as the top or bottom portions of the screen are occupied by an ad selling me UGG boots. On a 22 inch screen, my focus can look away from the ad and concentrate on game play, but on a 9 inch screen, the ad is in your face, annoying the sh*t out of you.
Since all my Android devices are rooted, I can easily eliminate all ads using a specially crafted hosts file, but that would impact apps that I happen to like and would like to support. I don’t mind ads, as long as they are done in good taste and don’t take away from the experience. But when I see a game surface shrunk by an ad, especially on an app trying to gain traction, I roll my eyes in disbelief.
As Android gains more of a foothold, ad blocking schemes and alternative app markets will spring up unless an acceptable ad policy is put in place by Google. This is after all, Open Source we’re talking about, nobody has a lock on our devices just yet.
We’ve come too far to give up who we are
So let’s raise the bar and our cups to the stars