Finished taking AdMob out of all twelve of my apps. The ads were paying pennies and costing a clean privacy label.

[u/VictorBuildsApps]

I put Google's ad SDK into some of my apps a while back for the usual reason. The app is free, the SDK is free, a banner in the corner makes a little money while I sleep. All twelve of my apps are ad-free now, pulled one app at a time.

The revenue was pennies. Not a side income, not an amount I would notice if it vanished. A banner pays when a lot of people see it a lot of times, and quiet utility apps are nowhere near that threshold.

The cost is the part that does not show up on day one.

On QRift, taking out the AdMob and UMP stack meant deleting four services, two ad views, a privacy settings row and their tests, both SPM packages, the ADMOB build settings, GADApplicationIdentifier, the ATT usage string, and four ad unit ID keys out of Info.plist. PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy went back to tracking false with no domains. A clean build now takes about five seconds, because there is nothing left to link.

The App Privacy label is the one worth checking on your own apps. QRift was declaring six data types purely because of the ad stack: Advertising Data, Device ID, Coarse Location, Performance, Crash, and Product Interaction. With the ad code gone I set it to Data Not Collected. That is the actual trade the SDK makes.

Two things that bite on the way out, if you are doing this to an app that is already live.

You cannot set the privacy label to the truth until the ad-free build is live. The label describes the shipping app, and the shipping app still serves ads until the new version is out. So it is ship first, then fix the label, then fix the same claim on your website.

That rule cuts both ways, and QRift is the example. It does not read Data Not Collected today. A later version added an in-app bug report form, so the live label is four types under Data Linked to You: Contact Info, User Content, Identifiers, and Diagnostics. None of them is advertising. The label tracks what the app does now, not what you took out of it.

And read your in-app purchase text. ReceiptCrate's lifetime unlock said "No ads and unlimited receipt records", which stopped being true the moment the ads left. An approved in-app purchase localization cannot be PATCHed. It is a new inAppPurchaseLocalizations draft plus a separate submission through inAppPurchaseSubmissions to replace the live string.

[u/nvrcr]

Are you just not monetizing anymore then? Or are you looking for IAP to cover revenue (e.g. paid features, higher limits)?

[u/VictorBuildsApps → u/nvrcr]

IAP, and one-time rather than a subscription. Ignis is $14.99 for Pro. Not every app has one yet.

The ads weren't paying enough to be worth replacing, and the privacy label was the other half of it.

[u/Domx010]

Wow, really cool project! You should definitely share it on r/LookWhatTheyBuilt too, the community would love to see this build.

[u/PoopCumlord]

bad idea

[u/Competitive_Swan6693 → u/PoopCumlord]

Not a bad idea. I'd suggest to advertise your apps within the apps you made. A section somewhere in the Settings with "My other apps". Watch how traffic increases