AdMob mediation/bidding in Defold: are we limited to a small set of supported networks?

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I tested unity adapter. It works on the mediation branch.

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2026-01-23 17:14:55.558 15108-15108 UnityMediationAdapter   com.defold.adtest                    D  Unity Ads initialized successfully.
2026-01-23 17:14:55.564 15108-15108 AdmobJNI                com.defold.adtest                    D  Adapter name: com.google.android.gms.ads.MobileAds, Description: , Latency: 30
2026-01-23 17:14:55.564 15108-15108 AdmobJNI                com.defold.adtest                    D  Adapter name: com.google.ads.mediation.unity.UnityMediationAdapter, Description: , Latency: 1256
2026-01-23 17:14:55.567 15108-15167 defold                  com.defold.adtest                    D  DEBUG:SCRIPT: EVENT_COMPLETE: Initialization complete

Setting this up was not a pleasant experience, mainly because the SDK provides no feedback until everything is fully configured in the dashboard. For example, with Unity you must complete all the steps from this instruction: Integrate Unity Ads with mediation  |  Android  |  Google for Developers. It is impossible to test using Google’s test IDs; you have to use your own IDs. There are also no intermediate states like “adapter added but not initialized”. If something is missing, there is nothing in the logs or Ad Inspector, and if everything is done correctly, it simply reports that everything works fine.

For testing purposes, I added a checkbox in game.project -> admob.test_ads_in_debug that marks the device as a test device for the AdMob network.

Testing each adapter individually would take a lot of time, and I likely will not do it myself right now. This would require creating accounts in every ADS network, filling out company details, setting up projects, and passing any required reviews (e.g. IronSource).
That said, I expect that any adapter that builds should work. At the moment, only Chartboost fails to build, so I will remove it temporarily.

I recommend that you use the mediation branch. Select the adapters you need in the game.project under the admob section and carefully configure everything in the dashboard following the instructions above. If a checkbox is missing in this section, it means that the adapter is not required for bidding for that network (except for Chartboost, which I will remove until it is fixed on our side).

I will update this topic later with information about iOS support and when the PR with mediation support is merged.

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