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How to identify an iOS device uniquely with identifierForVendor

Swift version: 5.10

Paul Hudson    @twostraws   

Early iOS releases gave every device a unique identifier, but this was soon abused by developers to identify individual users uniquely – something that Apple really dislikes. So, Apple removed the truly unique identifier and instead introduced an identifier for each vendor: a UUID that's the same for all apps for a given developer for each user, but varies between developers and between devices.

That is, if a user has five of your apps installed and five of mine, your five will all share the same vendor identifier, and my five will all share the same vendor identifier, but our two identifiers will be different.

Here's how to use it:

if let uuid = UIDevice.current.identifierForVendor?.uuidString {
    print(uuid)
}
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Available from iOS 6.0

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