The part of Ponderanda that will never carry an advertisement
Everything we ship is free and paid for by advertising. So the interesting decision in a new app is not where the ads go, it is where they are not allowed to.
In this piece
Everything Emberfig makes is free and paid for by advertising. That is the whole business, stated plainly, and it means the honest question about any new app is not whether it has ads but where we decided they were not allowed.
Ponderanda went out on 17 August. It gives you five arithmetic problems once a day, the same five as everybody else, generated at midnight UTC. You get one attempt. A wrong answer ends the day.
The daily ladder carries no advertising, and that is permanent.
Why the most-used screen is the one with no inventory
This is backwards from how ad-funded apps are usually built. The screen people open every day is the screen with the most impressions available, so it is normally the screen that carries the most.
We put nothing on it.
The reasoning is not generosity. A daily puzzle is a habit or it is nothing. The entire product is one small moment, repeated, and the thing that kills a habit is a moment of friction sitting exactly where the habit lives. An interstitial between opening the app and seeing today’s problems would earn one impression and cost the session that would have followed tomorrow.
There is a version of this argument that is just an assertion, so here is the part that is not. For a free ad-funded app, revenue is roughly sessions multiplied by ads per session. Ads per session is capped: by policy, by taste, and by how much a person will tolerate. Session count has no ceiling. So an ad that costs you returning users is not a trade, it is a loss with a receipt attached.
We have not proven that on our own numbers yet. Ponderanda has been out for two days.
The other thing that is uncapped
Every past day stays playable, free, with no limit. So do eight practice paths that drill one skill at a time.
This is the specific complaint the app was built against: puzzle and brain-training apps that cap free play, commonly at around three rounds a day, and then sell you the fourth. We think that is the wrong trade for a category that people come to daily, and we built the opposite.
We have not yet published the complaint record behind that. It is the reason the app exists, and until the reviews and threads are counted and quoted properly it stays a stated reason rather than an evidenced one. That teardown is owed.
What it will not tell you
Ponderanda does not make you smarter. It will not improve your focus, your memory or your general intelligence, and it does not say otherwise anywhere in the app or on the listing.
Refusing that claim is the single easiest thing in the category to get wrong, because the claim sells and nobody is required to substantiate it. What the app can honestly offer is narrower and actually measurable: you get faster at the arithmetic you practise. It will tell you by how much, and it stays quiet until it has enough of your own data to say something true, which takes about two months.
An app that waits two months before making a claim about you is not a good growth strategy. It is the only version we could write down without flinching.
The timer we removed
There is no visible countdown while you are solving.
Time pressure that you can see degrades performance in people who are anxious about arithmetic, which is a large share of the people this app is for. So the clock runs, because the number is interesting afterwards, and it is not shown to you while you are thinking. You see it when you are done.
Rest days are free and automatic. There is no streak to buy back, no notification telling you what you lost, and no countdown to losing it.
What we are not claiming
That any of this is the right commercial decision. It is two days old, there are no install numbers worth reporting, and the honest position is that we have chosen the version we can defend rather than the version that earns most in month one.
If it turns out that a daily puzzle with no ads in the daily part cannot pay for itself, that will be worth writing up too, and we will say so here rather than quietly adding an interstitial.
You can play it in a browser at ponderanda.com, or get it on Google Play.
Written by Adeboye Oluwatimileyin and Moses-Azuoru George, the two people who are Emberfig. We make money from AdMob inside the apps. This site carries no ads yet. You never pay us and we never sell your data.