We’ve noticed an unexpected behavior in our production iOS app where the UIDevice.current.identifierForVendor value occasionally changes, even though:
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- The app is distributed via the App Store (not TestFlight or Xcode builds)
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- We do not switch provisioning profiles or developer accounts
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- No App Clips, App Thinning, or other advanced features are in use
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- There’s no manual reinstall or device reset in the scenarios observed (as per user feedback)
Any insights or confirmations would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
My general advice on this topic is to structure your app so that it’s resilient to identifierForVendor (IDFV) changes. IDFV is useful, but there are numerous cases where it’s documented to change. Your app has to handle those cases gracefully and, once you have that code in place, you’ll handle any unexpected changes just fine.
If you’re able to reproduce a situation where IDFV changes unexpectedly, you should absolutely file a bug about that. However, don’t be surprised if that bug comes back as ‘documentation changed’, that is, we added another item to the list of items that are documented to cause IDFV to change.
If you do file any bugs about this, post the bug numbers, just for the record.
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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