[MUSIC PLAYING]
ZOEY FAN: Hello, all.
Welcome to "Flutter Update."
Today, we are here to bring you some exciting news
about app monetization.
I'm Zoey, a Product Manager on the Flutter team.
Here at Google, we want to help you by offering tools
to make money from your Flutter app,
whether you're targeting iOS or Android.
And of course, there are lots of different ways
that apps make money--
accepting payments as a storefront
for a physical business, offering subscriptions
or in-app purchases, or including ads directly
in your application.
On the Flutter team, our goal is to help you easily integrate
with all types of monetization features
so you can focus on delivering a high quality customer
experience.
Today, we're making several announcements
that we think you will like, particularly
if you want to integrate ads into your Flutter app.
First, I am very excited to announce that the Google Mobile
Ads SDK for Flutter is now generally
available for broad usage by any Flutter app.
We partner with the Google Apps team
to build this plugin to be the most seamless and fully
featured ad solution for Flutter developers.
The plugin works on both iOS and Android,
and support loading and displaying all GMA SDK ad
formats.
Ads can be used in a lot of different ways in your app.
For example, banner ads--
usually a rectangle ad that occupies a spot
within an app's layout, either at the top
or bottom of the device screen.
Interstitial ads-- full screen ads that
cover the whole screen of your app.
These ads work great when you place them at natural breaks
and transitions in your app.
For example, you can place them after the user completes
a level in a game.
Rewarded video ads-- one of the most popular ad
formats among game developers.
These are apps that reward users for watching short videos.
Native ads-- a highly customizable format
that allows you to design them to match the look
and feel of your ad content.
Native allows you to provide a seamless ad experience
with minimal interruptions to the app.
And last but not least, we also added
a new format called App Open.
App Open ads are a special fullscreen ad format
intended for publishers wishing to monetize their app load
screen.
App Open ads can be closed at any time,
and are designed to be shown when your users bring
your app to the foreground.
App Open adds automatically show a small branding area,
so users still know they're in your app.
In addition to all the ad formats supported,
another highlight of the Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter
is that we are unifying support for both Ad Manager and AdMob.
For those of you who are not familiar,
AdMob and Ad Manager are two different ad services.
Generally speaking, small to medium size publishers
prefer AdMob because it's an easy to use solution.
Google Ad Manager is an ad management platform
for large publishers who have significant direct sales
and need more advanced features.
That being said, no matter what size publisher you are,
you can customize the Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter
to meet your needs.
In addition, to help you optimize your ad performance,
we're including a beta version of Ads Mediation.
Mediation is a feature that helps
you manage all of the ad sources you
use to serve ads to your apps in one place.
These include non-Google ad networks such as FAN, AppLovin,
et cetera.
Using Mediation, you can send incoming ad requests
to multiple ad sources and find the best available ones
to fill the requests.
Mediation can help maximize your revenue
by ranking all the ad sources based on optimized performance.
I'm only highlighting a few major features today,
but we're supporting almost all Google Mobile Ads SDK
features in this plugin.
These are the same ads features that are available to you
if you build a native iOS and Android app.
You can use the same tooling to manage your campaigns,
track your ads' performance, et cetera.
The Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter
is available today for you to download from pub.dev.
In addition to ads, we've been expanding our monetization
offerings across to help you grow your business.
For example, our In-App Purchase plugin
allows you to integrate with a single unified service
for offering additional content in your app, like premium
services, digital goods, and subscriptions.
Moreover, Flutter's Pay plugin lets developers integrate once
and access Google Pay on Android and Apple Pay on iOS.
This makes it easier and faster to support both platforms
with a seamless experience for your users
to pay for things like groceries, retail merchandise,
and food delivery.
With these monetization solutions,
not only can you build beautiful performance Flutter apps,
you can earn revenue to build a successful business, too.
We've been working with a few early adopters who
are eager to get started with ad support using Flutter ahead
of our production release.
It's been valuable to fine-tune the release with them prior
to today's launch.
I'd like to introduce you to one of the biggest, Lotum,
who are the developers of the massively successful word
game, "4 Pics 1 Word," a top-grossing app
in 50 countries.
It is my great pleasure to have Petra join us today
to share their experience.
Hi, Petra.
PETRA LANGENBACHER: Thank you, Zoey, and hi, everyone.
My name is Petra, and I'm a developer at Lotum
on the "4 Pics 1 Word" team.
At Lotum, we create mobile games that millions
of friends and families play together every day.
And one of them is "4 Pics 1 Word," a guessing game where
four pictures have one word in common,
and you have to guess which one.
Until 2019, we maintained two different code bases
for our Android and iOS apps.
However, over the years, the code
became more and more complicated and high
maintenance, making it difficult to work on new features.
At that point, we started to rewrite the code, this time,
with Flutter and only one code base, which
has huge benefits for the whole development team.
Now, we only need half the time to develop new features.
For monetization, we work with Google Mobile Ads for Flutter
to display interstitials and rewarded videos.
In-app purchases are integrated through Flutter
as well, that allow players to buy a premium version
or different coin packs.
To be honest, we've been fine-tuning and optimizing
our app for years, and we wondered
whether a big rewrite might impact our revenue or user
base.
But we've been pleasantly surprised
to see that wasn't the case at all.
We've been able to make these changes
without any negative impact on usage or revenue.
Flutter has been a real game changer
for the future development of "4 Pics 1 Word."
And we are very excited about pushing the boundaries
for this product even further.
ZOEY FAN: It's wonderful to hear.
Thank you again for joining us today.
We wish you all the success with "4 Pics 1 Word."
If you're interested to learn more about our monetization
offerings, please check our monetization page
on our new website, where you can find samples,
collabs, documentation, and more.
Building a Flutter app is just the start.
With our suite of monetization features,
we hope to help you launch a successful business
with Flutter, too.
Bye now.
[MUSIC PLAYING]