Do I expect this to happen? No. Might I as well make the post anyway? Sure.

According to the "buy lavastones" option, ten bucks is 300 lavastones. I wouldn't even mind if it was double that. I don't have ten dollars, but I do have lavastones from watching ads and man, that lemur was handy.

I mean, that said, I am 100% sure you aren't getting 3 cents per ad watched. Probably more like 0.03. ...I should stop before I make the argument against this more effective than the argument for it.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Lemur and Heron follow you when you restart your game. Things purchased with lavastones do not.

Example: You have 48,000 tech points, are level 2 in all techs except medicine, have 175 lavastones and 10,000 food when you decide to reset your game profile for some reason. You had also purchased the Lemur, upgraded one extra crafting basket, and traded some lavastones for a totem.

After the reset, you'll pick 5 new first villagers, have 0 lavastones, tech points, and food, only the basic crafting basket, and no totems. But you'll have your Lemur!

Well... dang, that seems like resetting is a terrible idea, then. If the idea is that things you pay real money for stay, why wouldn't you keep your lavastones?

Resetting worked for me because I did it fairly early, when I decided I didn't like some of the decisions I had made. The vast majority of my lavastones came from watching ads. I tried for 100 lavastones a day. It helps that I enjoy playing some of the interactive ads.

The reason there's a difference in what you keep and what you don't keep after resetting or deleting an app is that the various app stores have established different categories of in-app purchases. Even though all in-app purchases cost real money, it's the app store's categories that determine what can be kept/restored and what cannot. Each of the various app stores has their own categories, and it's important to understand how they work, so that you know what your rights are when something unexpected happens.

The way these categories apply to VVO2 is that the pets (lemur and heron) are the 'permanent' kind of purchases, and lavastones are categorized as 'consumable' (non-permanent) purchases.

If you'd like to check it out, here is a link to Apple's support article on in-app purchases. The other app stores have similar implementations of in-app purchases, although their terminology differs a bit.

Huh, that's really interesting! I had no idea it worked like that, always cool to learn something new.