What causes an interstitial ad not preloaded?

You call load and show together at the breakpoint, so the ad has not finished fetching and either fails to display or freezes the transition while it loads.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix an Interstitial Ad Not Preloaded Showing Blank or Late

Quick answer: Preload the next interstitial as soon as the previous one closes, and only call show against an ad whose load callback has already reported ready.

You finish a level, call load then show, and the player sees a frozen black screen or no ad at all. Interstitials must be fetched in advance. Preloading the next ad after each show fixes the stall.

How to fix it

1. Load early, show later

Request the interstitial well before the breakpoint (for example at level start) and gate show() on the onAdLoaded callback having fired. Showing an unloaded ad fails silently.

2. Refill after every show

In the ad-closed callback, immediately request the next interstitial so one is always warm for the following breakpoint.

3. Have a no-ad fallback

If no ad is ready when the breakpoint arrives, just continue gameplay rather than blocking. Never stall the player waiting on a fill.

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.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.