Developer Access To The UDID Deprecated in iOS 5

A major change has been noticed in Apple’s latest operating system iOS 5 with the way that developers access an iDevice’s unique identifier number.

For those who are not developers or unfamiliar with the concept, the ‘UDID’ allows developers to identify app users on a specific device by device basis. Many apps and mobile ad networks use the UDID or hashed version to keep track of who their users are and what actions they have taken.

As Techcrunch points, App publishers and developers are now supposed to create their own unique identifiers to keep track of users going forward, which means they may have to throw all of their historical user date out of the window and start from scracth again.

Apple describes the change in its developer documentation:

Deprecated in iOS 5.0

uniqueIdentifier

An alphanumeric string unique to each device based on various hardware details. (read-only) (Deprecated in iOS 5.0. Instead, create a unique identifier specific to your app.)

This major change indicates Apple’s approach towards security and privacy concerns.

Developers and other readers: What do you think of this change in iOS 5? Security consciousness? Or just a small change?


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3 responses to “Developer Access To The UDID Deprecated in iOS 5”

  1. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Please, be still. There is a solution: http://stackoverflow.com/q/6993325/492624

  2. Avinash Kumpati Avatar
    Avinash Kumpati

    Thanks for providing the link. Any developer out there should verify the authenticity!

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I think it is really bad the drop. I can understand the privacy stuff. But we used the UDID to enable security access to highly sensitive Enterprise Data. (Only one security layer of many) Every user who wanted to access this data over phone was asked before he give it out. The advantage was. If we needed to block a user from access, (stolen phone, …) we just needed to delete the UDID and not the entire user account.

    For us .. We really need to think about a new concept. That sux so much

    Are there any suggestions out there?

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