iOS 5 was announced at WWDC 2011 earlier last month and the first iOS 5 beta was released the very next day. It is obvious that iOS 5 will be different from its predecessors, but there is a major modification that Apple has made when it released iOS 5 beta 6 yesterday. Apple has decided to phase out the UDID, the Unique Device Identifier, access for developers.
Apple has kept this change discreet . This change was mentioned in a recent update to the documentation of iOS 5 which is only available to the registered developers of Apple and was originally posted by TechCrunch. A portion of the document is shown below:
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.)
The UDID, Unique Device Identifier is a sequence of 40 alphabets and numbers. It is a type of code which is different for every iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad device. Apple uses UDID to grant its users access to beta versions of applications, that have not been released on the store, for testing. Application developers and mobile ad networks use it to identify user's devices and to monitor their activities. In case you're wondering, this is how you find the UDID of your iDevice.
This change can be really hard on app developers. As a result of this change, Application developers and mobile ad networks have to make their own unique identifiers to identify their users. This also means that the application developers might have to delete all of their existing user data and re-start from the very beginning.
Since Apple folk have been very secretive, the only comprehensive reason that comes to mind, for this change is privacy concern. However, it is not clear whether Apple's own services, like Game Center and iAds, are adapting to the change. If it is not implementing the change on itself, Game Center, iAds and other Apple services will be one step ahead of the third party services primarily due to the fact that they won't have root level access via the UDID and will probably have to use web cookies and other alternatives for tracking users.
What reason would Apple give for taking away developer UDID access? Security issues maybe? If you're a developer, we'd definitely like to know what your concerns regarding this move.