DevLog #006 — AdMob Suspended Me. So I Deleted My Ads.

July 15, 2026

The email came in this morning. AdMob suspended ad serving on my account for 30 days due to “invalid activity”.

I hadn’t intentionally clicked my own ads. With only a handful of early players — mostly people close to me — I suspect Google’s invalid traffic detection simply didn’t like the traffic pattern. I can’t prove that’s what happened, because AdMob doesn’t disclose the details behind a suspension.

What I could actually measure was how much this cost me. Sudoku Fog still has a small number of daily active users. Whatever the ads were bringing in, it wasn’t enough to be worth an appeal, a wait, and a reinstatement process.

So I didn’t fight it. I turned ads off — not just for the suspension window, but for good, at least for now. Fewer interruptions for the players I do have felt like a better trade than revenue I couldn’t even confirm was real.

That decision broke something else, though. Part of the reward loop — extra hints, Smart Notes, revives — was wired to rewarded ads. No ads meant no obvious way to earn them anymore.

I didn’t want to just delete that loop. I replaced it. Every player now gets a small base amount of hints, notes, and revives that refreshes daily, plus more for finishing the daily challenge and for finishing any regular game at all. No ad tap required.

I also didn’t want this to be a one-way door. If ads ever make sense again, turning them back on shouldn’t mean touching gameplay code — so the reward system now routes through a single policy switch, and the daily grants and the old ad-based top-up are two branches of that switch, not two separate systems bolted together:

                  Remote Config
                        │
                        ▼
                 reward_policy
                        │
        ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
        ▼                ▼               ▼
     Daily          Rewarded Ads      Disabled
        │                │               │
        ▼                ▼               ▼
   Inventory       Inventory → Ad       Deny
        │                │               │
        └────────────────┴───────────────┘
                         ▼
              UI (Hints / Smart Notes / Revive)

  Pro players bypass the entire reward policy.

Right now the switch is set to Daily and the ad branch just sits there, unused. But flipping it back on later is a config change, not a rewrite.

In hindsight, the suspension solved a problem I hadn’t questioned yet. I’d been designing rewards around ads instead of around the player. Losing the ads forced me to redesign the reward system — and I think the game is better for it.