IdentifierForVendor changed unexpectedly + forum is broken

Hi jero

We had exactly the same problem with an app that has been published for sale on June 6. Several updates of the app before that date kept the identifier. Now all our users got a new identifier, which breaks our device verification.

I would be very interested if this is a one time problem or if this change is permament.

I made no major change on the provisioning profile recently.

Hi jeroentrappers

We appear to be having the same issue as well. App published on June the 9th, no profile changes, only difference to previous releases was the build machine changed.

Interested to find out more.

Hi,

The same problem here. Would like to know if it just one time thing for new devleoper programm update or something is broken.

Also, does any body do the distribution after that time slot? Dose the IDFV change again?

Same here and I've also posted in the old forums, where gc from Apple repplied:

"Please file bug reports on this at <https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting>>. We're aware of this issue and are investigating. There's no known workaround at this time."

As stated, I've posted a bugreport, which is now marked as duplicated. If you didn't do it already, please also post a bugreport to increase the visibility of the bug.

Thx.

As you mentioned, I also do the bug report.

Yes, there is a problem with this. We have written about this in the old forum, and have reported a bug (which has been marked as a duplicate and closed). Would be great to hear from Apple about this. Is it going to be fixed, and if so - when? Or should we look for alternative solutions

Hello,

We are experiencing this issue too with many users. Can you confirm if this is related just to iOS 8.3? Do you have cases with any other iOS versions?

When did you start to experience the issue? We have several days with these problems (maybe one or two weeks), I don't know what caused it because iOS 8.3 came out more than 2 months ago (April 8th). Any ideas?

By the way, I sent a bug report to.

Regards.

We have seen this too. Without researching too much about it yet, this is what happened: For a new app we work on, we realized that identifierForVendor no longer works as advertised in the documentation. So the feature we were gonna use it for, well, we leave that feature out of this new app for now. We also confirmed the problem exists in a live app which we released a few weeks ago. The same feature is there, and also in most apps we created the last two years. I just assumed all of that broke because of the problem with identifierForVendor, but some of you guys believe this is just a problem with iOS 8.3, or recently released/updated apps?

We've seen this happening in different OS versions (from 7.1.2 to 8.3) and differente devices (iPhone4 to 6).

From our tests, that included hard reset an iphone and installing 2 apps from the same vendor (repeated several times), the results were completely random: some times everything worked fine, sometimes the second app wouldn't get the same IDFV and even after uninstalling only one of them, the other would stop having the same IDFV.

This doesn't seem to be related to the OS version I'm afraid, I suspect xcode (I think this all started happening after the last update, but I can't be sure) or something in iTunes Connect when they're "cooking" the final ipa for the store.

We have this problem too. 😉

I believe this is not really related to iTunes Connect, just because this used to work in an adhoc-only IPA setting during development testing - where we only used the old TestFlight ie ipas that never touched iTunes Connect yet. Now it also stopped working during testing. So the problem might be with the latest iOS 8.x... which would mean that the problem is more inside Xcode or iOS 8.x... but if you say that the problem appears on 7.x then I guess only Apple knows the answer.

We are seeing this. If we download the app from the AppStore, we're only recently seeing different IdentifierForVendor values, but if I take those same IPA files and add it to iTunes, the values are the same. If we get our most recent versions of the apps from iTunes Connect, the values are the same. It only seems broken if we get the apps from the AppStore. Our submitted apps were built using Xamarin iOS 7.0.5.2 and XCode 5.0.2.

The documentation says this about identifierForVendor: "Normally, the vendor is determined by data provided by the App Store. If the app was not installed from the app store..." It then goes on to explain how identifierForVendor works for non-AppStore deploys, but not how it works when it is downloaded from the AppStore.

From this question on StackOverflow, I suspect that the AppStore version of the IdentifierForVendor is now based on the provisioning profile. We are using unique provisioning profiles on each app rather than using a wild card provisioning profile. Until I found this thread, I was thinking that if I resubmit our apps to the store using a wild card provisioning profile and the latest XCode it would fix this, but now I'm doubtful.

Has anyone come across a workaround? Is there any visibility on the bugs already submitted to Apple?

We have the same issue, as many here we introduced a bug (on 6th of june), but still no answer from apple.

We have no known workaround at the moment, but are looking for a way to 'bind' devices using an ID, without using the IDFV anymore. Does anyone has a suggestion?

Right now I'm looking into the App Group entitlement to give us shared NSUserDefaults. It sounds like App Group (unlike iCloud and keychain-access-group entitlements) is shared on the device, but not over the iCloud account. I'm thinking if the shared "deviceid" NSUserDefault key doesn't exist, we'll save the IdentifierForVendor ID and then use that for all our apps once it saved.

I'm curious if anyone else has tried that workaround.

I've just checked my bug report, which was marked as Duplicated and it now says that the original bug is closed. This sounds as good news, but does anyone has more details? What whas fixed and where? Connect, xcode, SDK, iOS?

Some more information from Apple would really be useful as this bug caused some severe problems with our apps and we need to explain what happened to our clients.

I'm checking with a live app which uses this feature.

iOS 8.3 device: not fixed, problem still there, ID change between installs where other apps of us are still on device

iOS 8.4 device: not fixed, problem still there, ID change between installs where other apps of us are still on device

So it's not fixed even in iOS 8.4. MAybe this won't get addressed until iOS 9??