With earlier news we reported that Apple this week rejecting apps that access a device’s unique identifier (UDID), according to some iOS app developers. UDIDs are used by some app developer in order to track user behaviour, but their use has been limited since they result in permanent and users are unable to block sending UDIDs to third parties. As confirmed by Tapbots’ Paul Haddad, Apple is now rejecting apps for their use of the UDID (Unique Device Identifier) value. Haddad says that the latest version of Tweetbot, version 2.2, has been rejected by the company for using the feature.
Haddad explains how Tweetbot uses it:
There’s been a lot of rumors going around lately that Apple is rejecting applications that send out device UDIDs but there’s not been any direct confirmation from Apple that this is a new policy. Well this morning we just got that confirmation in the form of a rejection.
Now this isn’t a particularly big deal for us since we already had code in place, for Tweetbot 2.3, that removes the need for UDID. It was a simple matter of moving that code back into 2.2 and re-submitting to Apple. We had a fixed version updated and uploaded to Apple within 2 hours of getting this message and are once again waiting for approval. If you are an app developer and depend on UDID for any functionality it’s time to migrate away from it, sooner or later Apple will catch you.
