Migrating Legacy AdMob to Google Play Services / Google Mobile Ads SDK

I developed my first Android app a few years back and at the time it was using Admob for mobile banner ads. Google bought AdMob a while back, and the time has come where Legacy AdMob usage is being retired this month (August 2014) and so you need to upgrade to the Google Play Services based Google Mobile Ads SDK.

First. Wow. I have to say, the steps and docs for how to do this seem to be spread over many different places. I’m not sure if all of these places actually walk you through the same steps just written in a different way, but it’s taken me a while to work out what I actually need to do. Some useful refs:

If you logon on the AdMob site, it will prompt you to complete a data migration step and update some account info – take care of that first here.

Info about legacy AdMod shutting down is here. Additional info in the FAQ.

Steps for moving to the Google Play Services based advertising seems to be covered here. I’m currently working through these steps for one of my apps, if I come across anything useful to share then I’ll post another update later.

Java 7 & 8 install location on Mac OS X

Somewhere between Java 6 and 7 it seems I lost track of where your JDK gets installed on Mac OS X. Prior to Java 7, it seems it was installed to:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

with symlinks pointing to the exact locations.

I was just setting up a new Eclipse install and was looking for where my 8 was installed – it was clearly installed as ‘java -version’ was telling me I was running 8, but it was no longer in the above location.

/usr/libexec/java_home (which I’ve mentioned before here) was telling me the following:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_20.jdk/Contents/Home

Hmm, so there you go. Looking inĀ /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ I had multiple versions of 7 and 8. If you need to point Eclipse to a JRE location for your installed JREs, then from 7 onwards I think this is what you need.