How to Fix AdMob Ads Requested Before the SDK Finished Initializing

Your first interstitial never fills because you load it in Start, but the AdMob SDK is still initializing its mediation adapters. Gating ad loads on the init completion callback fixes the early-request failures.

How to fix it

1. Initialize once at launch

Call MobileAds.Initialize a single time during startup and keep a flag for completion. Do not scatter init calls across scenes.

2. Wait for the completion callback

Begin your first ad load only inside the initialization completion handler, after you have confirmed adapter statuses are ready.

3. Queue early requests

If gameplay asks for an ad before init finished, queue the request and flush it from the init callback rather than dropping it.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.