Wednesday, 31 May 2017

How does ANDROID_ID on ARC (Chrome) differ from Android?



On Android, the ANDROID_ID is constant for a user profile on a device (see discussion here). This does not appear to be the case on ARC, but ARC is very new and hopefully this will change.



It is also worth noting - in regards to device identification with ARC - that the Android serial # is not available on ARC, that WiFi MAC address is not currently available (yes, I've seen people talk about using this for device id), and product model information is not available.



Motivation: I know it is not now recommended, but I think a lot of apps use the ANDROID_ID to identify devices in their server database.




The behavior of ANDROID_ID on Android means that, if a user uninstalls your app and then re-installs it, you would know and could eg. re-sync their data to the device. And if a user installs two apps of your apps, you know they are on the same device (and user profile).


Answer



In my experience - using ARC runtime 42.4410.288.23 on Chrome 41.0.2272.118 m (stable) on Windows - a new ANDROID_ID is generated for every app install.



So, for example, if you uninstall your app and then re-install it, it will see a new ANDROID_ID.



I should test this on a Chromebook, since that is the only platform supported for deployment at this time, but I don't have a Chromebook available.


No comments:

Post a Comment

c++ - Does curly brackets matter for empty constructor?

Those brackets declare an empty, inline constructor. In that case, with them, the constructor does exist, it merely does nothing more than t...