I read 524 reviews of 5 AdMob dashboard apps. Here's what people actually complain about

I build a small AdMob/AdSense revenue dashboard for Android called AdDeck. Last week I needed to decide what to put on its first Play Store screenshot, and I didn't want to guess. So I pulled every public review I could get for the five most-installed AdMob dashboard apps on Google Play and read the low-rated ones, one by one.

This post is the result. It's mostly about the category, not my app — if you're building or choosing any tool that touches your ad revenue, the pattern is worth knowing.

What I looked at

App	Installs	Rating	Text reviews collected	1★	2★	3★
Dash For AdMob	50,000+	4.55 (897 ratings)	283	51	10	15
AdMobile – AdMob Metrics	50,000+	4.63 (950 ratings)	201	16	3	8
AdMob Dashboard (sirmaur)	1,000+	–	23	2	0	1
Ad Earnings – Admob Dashboard	1,000+	–	12	2	1	0
AdMoola	1,000+	–	5	0	0	0

Method, so you can reproduce it: google-play-scraper (Python), languages en + ko, sort by newest, all pages. Only reviews with text are returned by Play, so the counts above are text reviews, not total ratings. I then classified the 103 reviews rated 1–3★ by keyword into eight buckets and summed the "helpful" votes (👍) on each.

Two apps carry almost all the signal — Dash For AdMob and AdMobile. The other three simply don't have enough reviews to say anything.

The eight complaints, ranked

#	Complaint	Reviews	👍 helpful votes
1	Crashes / won't open	21	6
2	Infinite loading / data never shows	14	40
3	Too many ads	11	48
4	Trust / privacy	10	7
5	Paywall / subscription	7	8
6	Numbers don't match the console	4	8
7	Feature requests (widget, CTR, same-name apps)	3	0
8	Session expires / re-login	2	2

Counting by number of reviews, crashes win. Counting by how many other people clicked "helpful", the ranking flips: ads and loading problems are what the silent majority agreed with.

What each bucket actually says

1. Crashes. Most of these cluster around one update in April 2026 ("crashing on launch after update… check 16kb page size"), plus a steady drip of "keeps closing" across 2024–2025. This is the cost of an app that shipped years ago and is maintained in bursts. Nothing to learn here except: the category is old.

2. Infinite loading. The single most-upvoted review in the whole dataset (21 👍) is:

"…it has been unable to load anything besides their own ads. It will not display my own in[formation]."

And the second (6 👍):

"I have reported it for more than 1 year, the monthly and yearly report only shows loading forever."

3. Too many ads. This is the bucket with the most helpful votes (48), and the reviews are almost funny in their consistency:

"Littered with ads so people can see their ad revenue. Not for me."

"The ads are too much now, UX is dead. Implement ads tastefully."

"Interstitial ads are not organic. Find another way to use them or remove them." (11 👍)

Think about the user here. They are a developer who earns money from ads. They open an app to check that money. And the app makes them watch a full-screen video ad first. Of course they hate it — it's their own business model pointed back at them.

4. Trust and privacy. The apps ask for Google account access, and a meaningful number of users refuse:

"I can't give you full permission of my google Account. I can't trust this type of publisher."

"After registration I started receiving spam emails."

"Disaster application asking for personal information too." (AdMobile)

Some of these are misunderstandings (AdMob's reporting API does need an OAuth grant). But the fear is rational: this is financial data, and the user cannot see where it goes.

5. Paywall. AdMobile's low ratings are mostly this:

"You have to buy a subscription to see anything useful. Google's Admob mobile website is much better."

"Basic functionalities as premium paid features."

And a Korean Dash For AdMob review describes being charged ₩13,000/year the moment they tapped "payment settings" while trying to cancel.

6. Wrong numbers. "Always shows 100% match rate while AdMob says 54.98%." "Not showing the accurate earnings." Small bucket, but it's the scariest one for a dashboard.

7–8. The rest. People want a home-screen widget, CTR as a metric, and a way to tell an Android and iOS app with the same name apart. Sessions expiring daily annoy a couple of people.

What I took from this

Three things, in order of how sure I am:

1. An ad-revenue app must not be ad-heavy. The users are ad professionals. Full-screen and video ads in this category are self-sabotage, and the helpful-vote count says the community agrees.
2. Trust has to be visible, not claimed. "We respect your privacy" means nothing. What users can actually verify: the OAuth scope the app asks for, whether there's a server, whether there's a subscription.
3. Crashes and loading are the symptoms of age. I can't promise my app won't crash — it has ~10 installs and I have no crash data worth quoting. What I can do is not repeat the choices above.

What AdDeck does about it (and what it doesn't)

I'll keep this to things you can check in the app or on the Play listing, not adjectives.

• No interstitial or video ads. The app has a native ad and a banner. That's it. (InterstitialAd, AppOpenAd, RewardedAd: zero occurrences in the codebase.)
• No subscription, no paywall. There is no billing code in the app. Everything is free.
• Read-only OAuth scopes only — admob.readonly and adsense.readonly. The app cannot change anything in your account.
• No server of ours. The only hosts the app talks to are *.googleapis.com. Tokens and data stay on the device.
• Widget, CTR, per-app ranking, mediation totals — the things people asked for above — are in.

What I can't claim: that it never crashes, that it's fast, or that its numbers are more accurate than anyone else's. It reads the same AdMob and AdSense reporting APIs everyone else does, and it's too new to have meaningful stability data. If you try it and it breaks, tell me — that's exactly the data I don't have yet.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eltacrew.addeck

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Data collected 2026-09-11 with google-play-scraper. Review quotes are verbatim from public Google Play reviews. I'm the developer of AdDeck; the competitor apps' names are used only to identify the public listings analyzed.