- Accessing Basic Device Information
- Adding Device Capability Restrictions
- Recipe: Checking Device Proximity and Battery States
- Recipe: Recovering Additional Device Information
- Recipe: Using Acceleration to Locate "Up"
- Working with Basic Orientation
- Retrieving the Current Accelerometer Angle Synchronously
- Recipe: Using Acceleration to Move Onscreen Objects
- Recipe: Accelerometer-Based Scroll View
- Recipe: Core Motion Basics
- Recipe: Retrieving and Using Device Attitude
- Detecting Shakes Using Motion Events
- Recipe: Using External Screens
- Tracking Users
- One More Thing: Checking for Available Disk Space
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Tracking Users
Tracking is an unfortunate reality of developer life. Apple deprecated the UIDevice property that provided a unique identifier tied to device hardware. It replaced it with two identifier properties. Use identifierForAdvertising to return a device-specific string unique to the current device. The identifierForVendor property supplies a string that’s tied to each app vendor. This should return the same unique string regardless of which of your apps is in use. This is not a customer id. The same app on a different device can return a different string, as can an app from a different vendor.
These identifiers are built using the new NSUUID class. You can use this class outside of the tracking scenario to create UUID strings that are guaranteed to be globally unique. Apple writes, “UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers), also known as GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) or IIDs (Interface Identifiers), are 128-bit values. A UUID is made unique over both space and time by combining a value unique to the computer on which it was generated and a value representing the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since October 15, 1582 at 00:00:00.”
The UUID class method can generate a new RFC 4122v4 UUID on demand. Use [NSUUID UUID] to return a new instance. (Bonus: It’s all in uppercase!) From there, you can retrieve the UUIDString representation or request the bytes directly via getUUIDBytes:.