Apple Phasing Out Developer Access to UDIDs in iOS 5

[Yumunum]

Exactly! I've always hated apps that use UDID to identify you. Take Pandora for instance. If I sell/give away my iDevice, and the new owner downloads Pandora, all of a sudden, they are looking at my Pandora playlists, despite my having wiped it to factory state before handing it over to the new owner? That's not desirable behavior at all.

As for games that tie their gaming accounts to UDID, each time I got a new device, I had to jump through so many hoops to get my account moved to the new device, I just stopped playing them.

So I'm really glad Apple is putting a stop to this. It's about time!

What the crap. So I've sold three iOS devices in the last year... And some people might get into some of my accounts if they download certain apps.

That's great to know. So much for "wiping" the devices

 

[SmoMo]

So you want it so only Apple can offer ads and use there much larger resources to dig the deepest into your life? It also means fewer free apps.

I think it is funny so many of you put blind trust in Apple. I trust Apple a hell of a lot less than I trust Google and I do not trust Google that much.

Is it really that funny tho?
Personally I look at it like this, Apple want to keep a clean reputation because their primary business in not advertising, therefore they have a lot to lose from bad press about the small advertising part of their business leaking out and soiling the rest of their image.

I don't see the other advertising companies in the same situation, they have far less to lose, so I trust Apple far more than mere advertising companies ( Google included, I may well be wrong but isn't their primary business in advertising? I mean, I've never paid them a penny for any service and definitely not any hardware so I am guessing they have been hoping I'd click on one of the adverts of the google homepage , or have been paid to fix the order of the search results ).

I think you might be misunderstanding this trust of Apple to be something more profound, perhaps you think I believe Apple is 'good' to the core and that is why I can trust them.
I just think they have a lot to lose by mistreating people's data, and that is likely to keep them honest.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Is it really that funny tho?
Personally I look at it like this, Apple want to keep a clean reputation because their primary business in not advertising, therefore they have a lot to lose from bad press about the small advertising part of their business leaking out and soiling the rest of their image.

I don't see the other advertising companies in the same situation, they have far less to lose, so I trust Apple far more than mere advertising companies ( Google included, I may well be wrong but isn't their primary business in advertising? I mean, I've never paid them a penny for any service and definitely not any hardware so I am guessing they have been hoping I'd click on one of the adverts of the google homepage , or have been paid to fix the order of the search results ).

I think you might be misunderstanding this trust of Apple to be something more profound, perhaps you think I believe Apple is 'good' to the core and that is why I can trust them.
I just think they have a lot to lose by mistreating people's data, and that is likely to keep them honest.

Primary business and making as much money as possible are two different things. Also Apple clearly is not doing much to keep a clean record. It is currently doing pretty weak court cases left and right and suing others. Apple is plays dirty.

Apple also knows it has plenty of blind followers who will defend it no matter what it does so it can get away with a lot of stuff.
The fact that people believe that this is "about protecting the consumer" is laughable. This is about pushing out competitors and locking it down even more. If Apple could get away with it they would block all over email services but there version from working.

 

[BaldiMac]

Primary business and making as much money as possible are two different things. Also Apple clearly is not doing much to keep a clean record. It is currently doing pretty weak court cases left and right and suing others. Apple is plays dirty.

They sue people, so they're dirty? That's some really crappy logic.

Apple also knows it has plenty of blind followers who will defend it no matter what it does so it can get away with a lot of stuff.

Throw in some fanboy FUD.

The fact that people believe that this is "about protecting the consumer" is laughable. This is about pushing out competitors and locking it down even more. If Apple could get away with it they would block all over email services but there version from working.

And then add a bit of baseless accusations and an inflammatory hypothetical.

You forgot to add a religious reference to complete the troll cycle.

 

[SmoMo]

Primary business and making as much money as possible are two different things. Also Apple clearly is not doing much to keep a clean record. It is currently doing pretty weak court cases left and right and suing others. Apple is plays dirty.
.

I'm sure they are not as clean as their image suggests, but that does not affect the reason why I trust Apple more than other advertising companies.

The reason I trust them, and sorry to repeat myself this 3rd time but you don't seem to be listening, is that as a company they are much much bigger than just iAd, and therefore I believe they will be very keen to stop any bad publicity arising from iAd and soiling their reputation.

The big difference with other advertising companies is that they are simply just advertising companies, there is no brand-name that will be damaged if they act bad and get caught.

I don't think I am deluded in putting more faith in the company which has the most to lose if they act bad. And if you think about this for a bit, you will see that that is not because I think Apple are inherently good.

Just that they are more likely to act that way, and in the world today that is pretty much the best you can hope for.

 

[iSee]

At the time I developed my app there was no way to ask Apple what subscriptions a user had bought (you can ask Apple what once off purchases have been made for your in-app things but not what subscriptions the user had),
so to make sure a user didn't lose their subscription I associated their subscriptions to their UID on my server. That way if you deleted the app and re-installed it you could still have access to the subscriptions.
At no point did I use the UID in an attempt to track what the user did or who the user was etc.

Good thing I was planning on decommissioning the app around this time anyway.

(I should note I provided a way to share your subscriptions across different iOS devices, but that just involved entering some completely random ID into your devices that I generated as I didn't want to make the user sign up to something with a username and password)

How did you handle the case where a subscriber lost (or had stolen, or damaged, etc) his/her device? You can use the same mechanism when a customer restores his/her device.

 

[divinox]

UDIDs may be poor identifiers, then again so are ip-numbers and cookies. (for those of you who dont get it, the latter two have worked very well so far despite their shortcomings).

Good. Developers just need to identify a user of that app. There's no reason for them to need access to the UDID or any other universally unique identifier. I really don't care what the advertisers need or want; they want to covertly make money off me without providing me a service or a product, and by watching me "over my shoulder" (so to speak). I don't care for that at all. Find another way that isn't so objectionable.

Apple knows. I'd be amazed if they didnt sell that info to the highest bidder (or perhaps more likely, used the data to do better with their own ad-thing). This just means Apple will have tighter control of the data.

(unless i'm missing something here).

addendum: granted, they may not know exactly what you're doing inside of an app (which could be aggregated by dev's otherwise), but still... Data is the next intel inside.

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I'm sure they are not as clean as their image suggests, but that does not affect the reason why I trust Apple more than other advertising companies.

The reason I trust them, and sorry to repeat myself this 3rd time but you don't seem to be listening, is that as a company they are much much bigger than just iAd, and therefore I believe they will be very keen to stop any bad publicity arising from iAd and soiling their reputation.

The big difference with other advertising companies is that they are simply just advertising companies, there is no brand-name that will be damaged if they act bad and get caught.

I don't think I am deluded in putting more faith in the company which has the most to lose if they act bad. And if you think about this for a bit, you will see that that is not because I think Apple are inherently good.

Just that they are more likely to act that way, and in the world today that is pretty much the best you can hope for.

Google?

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Not so. Deprecated means it's going away.

Not per definition. Deprecated functionality may be kept functioning for sake of maintaining backwards compatibility (e.g. look at php). Its up to Apple in the end if they want to break functionality or not. 50/50 if you ask me.

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sounds like Apple is doing this to lock down their own ads, Force game center on more people oh and make cross platform development harder.

This is more about lining their own pockets. Apple has zero interested in protecting the users. It makes it so only Apple has that data and no one else.

Basic coring strategy 101. Doubt theyll succeed though, given the way tech. is currently heading. Then again, they banned (or tried to ban) multi-platform dev. tools right? Says it all to me.

Luckily, there are fewer good ideas for apps than apps. The good ones will always spread.

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This is a change that is going to cause a lot of headaches for developers. It would be extremely useful if Apple provided us with an alternative to use. How about a hash of the UDID and app's bundle ID?

Edit: No idea why this is attracting negative votes!

You are questioning Jobs. Insta-downvote.

 

[marksman]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_4 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8K2 Safari/6533.18.5)

... That said, while it is available it is a pretty good way to track users usage without requiring them to log into other ...

Exactly, and I don't want to be tracked unless I give specific permission (by logging in to something). Why advertisers or other apps developers think they have the right to covertly follow me around is beyond me.

I dont care about them following me but that information has value and I want to be compensated to share it. Right now they are taking it for free.

 

[BugHunter]

Re: subscriptions

How did you handle the case where a subscriber lost (or had stolen, or damaged, etc) his/her device? You can use the same mechanism when a customer restores his/her device.

Unfortunately we didn't handle that, the subscriptions were a few dollars each so we didn't saw that as a lesser evil than forcing users to create accounts and having to give us an email etc. Still as you point out, not a perfect solution.
As other's have pointed out, selling your device would also unwittingly cause your account to be shared (which considering what subscriptions you own was the only thing we tied to your account - you might just get free subscriptions).

Hopefully the store API finally lets programs know what subscription a user bought and not just what one off purchases. I believe that missing feature is what caused most of the UUID programs to exist.
I guess Apple didn't want to be in charge of other companies subscriber lists.

 

[RobertMartens]

I'm not a fanboi of Apple

Welcome to MacRumours, I can tell by your spelling that you are French.

 

[RobertMartens]

I think it is funny so many of you put blind trust in Apple. I trust Apple a hell of a lot less than I trust Google and I do not trust Google that much.

So that's it. We fight for Apple's very survival during the 90's and enjoy their success in the last 10 years. And now that they actually succeed we can't trust them anymore.

That would be like loving Obama the candidate and fearing Obama the president. I don't think so.

 

[MacNewsFix]

If it reduces chances of Apple getting called before a Senate subcommittee to explain some privacy violation, I'm all for it, just so I get to hear one less "<insert nonsense>gate." It is a shame that ethical devs end up sharing the repercussions.

 

[ranReloaded]

Welcome to MacRumours, I can tell by your spelling that you are French.

fanboï

 

[Reason077]

You can bet that any app that supports iOS 5 won't be approved if it is still using UDID.

I don't think so. There are APIs in iOS that have been deprecated since iOS 3.0. In MacOS X there are APIs that have been deprecated since far earlier than that. APIs are rarely actually removed unless there's a very good reason for doing so, and I don't think there is here.

Plus, Apple would have warned developers long ago if something that drastic was going to happen.

And it is likely that Apple will move within the next year to force all apps to use iOS 4 if not 5.

Currently it is still possible to target all the way back to iOS 3.0, even with the very latest SDK betas.

I could see Apple making 4.0 the minimum eventually, largely because there's technologies like ARC that only work back to 4.0 and become hard to live without once you've tried them.

But, I doubt that will happen before iOS 6 rolls around. Apple are usually pretty good when it comes to backwards compatibility.

 

[accessoriesguy]

I don't see the other advertising companies in the same situation, they have far less to lose, so I trust Apple far more than mere advertising companies ( Google included, I may well be wrong but isn't their primary business in advertising? I mean, I've never paid them a penny for any service and definitely not any hardware so I am guessing they have been hoping I'd click on one of the adverts of the google homepage , or have been paid to fix the order of the search results ).

I think you might be misunderstanding this trust of Apple to be something more profound, perhaps you think I believe Apple is 'good' to the core and that is why I can trust them.
I just think they have a lot to lose by mistreating people's data, and that is likely to keep them honest.

Agreed, I did not know until recently that google looks at your gmail emails to give you "appropriate ad's" as well as a bunch of other stuff, google rocks because it offers a lot of free stuff but it's main business is advertisements.

I used to be a big google and apple fan, google search is still the way to go, but after learning the snooping they do, its pretty gross at what extent they will go for some money.