Replacement for Cordova device.uuid?

[Peter Olds]

In response to the Apple announcement that they will no longer accept applications that use the UUID: https://developer.apple.com/news/index.php?id=3212013a#top

Are there any replacements that we can use to uniquely identify a specific device?

[park2]

+ 1 on this.......

[Giacomo Balli]

did you look at the link you posted??

[Peter Olds]

Yes, obviously. My question was posted here in the PhoneGap group for a reason. My question is not what alternatives should we use as Apple has already given suggestions. My question is seeing that (at least the documentation doesn't suggest as much) PhoneGap does not currently grant API access to fetch the Vendor or Advertising ID, what alternatives does PhoneGap recommend.

[Shazron]

Normally I would say we could adopt [UIDevice identifierForVendor] but that is iOS 6 only, but we still have to support iOS 5. The stuff we are doing already is what Apple recommends, when they set it for deprecation earlier.

You would think identifierForVendor is semi reliable -- it is not according to the Sep 24 2012 (yellow highlighted) update to this blog post:

http://oleb.net/blog/2012/09/udid-apis-in-ios-6/

.. which would be the same behaviour as our device.uuid solution if your customer ever only installs one app from you (which in most cases is true).

The advertisingIdentifier is similar to what the UDID is from before - but if you erase the device, it changes (rare) - but you can only use it for serving ads.

The keychain method shown below will survive app deletes, but not device erase:

https://github.com/blackpixel/BPXLUUIDHandler

You could also get the MAC address, and hash it with a known salt to obfuscate the MAC address if privacy is a concern I suppose. This would always generate the same value for the device.

I will be bringing this up to the dev mailing list to see if we want to change our device.uuid approach.

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[Peter Olds]

What is a recommended solution to extract a Mac Address using PhoneGap?

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[Shazron]

1. Create a plugin: http://docs.phonegap.com/en/2.5.0/guide_plugin-development_index.md.html#Plugin%20Development%20Guide

2. Use this code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/677530/how-can-i-programmatically-get-the-mac-address-of-an-iphone

Note that one of my concerns for using the MAC address (even hashed) for device.uuid is it is the UDID problem all over again, privacy is removed. I'm not sure if Apple is blacklisting its use either or won't do so in the future.

[jcesarmobile]

I created the plugin for getting the MAC address using the code from the stack overflow thread.

http://goo.gl/hjuYF

I called it "NetworkInterfacesPlugin" because it returns an array with different network interface objects, with the interface name, mac address and IP.
That's because I think on iPhones it have 2 network interfaces, one for wifi and another for 3G (I can't test)

[jcesarmobile]

It seems that my plugin doesn't work if connected to a cellular network or wifi is off (or airplane mode)
I've created a new plugin that returns the wifi mac address even if it is off

http://goo.gl/olnMX