> As far as ANDROID_ID -- please be aware that some people concerned about > privacy very much do not like applications being able to retrieve something > that uniquely identifies their device
I only use ANDROID_ID to identify my own test phones and suppress ads when running my app on these test phones, to avoid inadvertently clicking on "my" Google AdMob ads once in while during app testing. So ANDROID_ID is in this use case never broadcast in any way, and there is no privacy issue for users while I need not make any code changes before release. Alternatively, I can implement a workaround by checking for the presence of some "secret" file that I manually put on my test phones, but using ANDROID_ID seemed a little more elegant. I understand that it may be hard for Google to verify whether or not an app broadcasts (encoded) unique identifiers along with non-identifying data. > As such, don't be surprised if in the future there appears the ability to > restrict access to ANDROID_ID. Is your advice then to use the special-file-checking workaround instead of ANDROID_ID? Both work fine technically. Thanks On Apr 1, 7:04 am, Dianne Hackborn <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 6:19 PM, davemac <[email protected]> wrote: > > It wasn't so much the unique ID I was looking for, rather some > > reassurance that Google has a certification program. From this > > particular case, and others I've heard about, it ought to be more > > robust than it is. > > It's not perfect. Few things are. As problems are found, it is improved. > > As far as ANDROID_ID -- please be aware that some people concerned about > privacy very much do not like applications being able to retrieve something > that uniquely identifies their device that can be correlated across > applications. As such, don't be surprised if in the future there appears > the ability to restrict access to ANDROID_ID. > > I very strongly recommend not using ANDROID_ID. If you want to have > settings retained if the user uninstalls and then re-installs, consider > using the backup manager. This also has the advantage of allowing you to > restore the user's settings across devices. > > -- > Dianne Hackborn > Android framework engineer > [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
