IdentifierForVendor changed unexpectedly + forum is broken

If you search for IdentifierForVendor on the old forum, you get a couple of hits of people telling that is has changed unexpectedly.


Can apple please confirm that there is/was an issue with this, in the period end may / beginning june.


We hypothesize that changes to our provisioning profiles (adding app groups for apple watch integration) has triggered a change in the value of identifierForVendor on update. However, we are still in the process of validating this hypothesis.


Has anyone had the same issue? Were there changes in your provisioning profile? How were you impacted?

Accepted Reply

There was an issue recently where apps were being given an incorrect identifierForVendor when they were installed or updated. This was a bug that was introduced near the beginning of May. Around July 21, the App Store completed the process of restoring the identifierForVendor of apps that experienced this bug to the value it had before the bug was introduced.


Apps that were installed or upgraded while this bug was present will see one more identifierForVendor change the next time the user updates or reinstalls the app after about July 21 but it will be a value the app had used before. (The data used to compute identifierForVendor is delivered along with app installations or updates.)


IMPORTANT: This means that you may get random reports about this issue because it only appears when the user updates your app.


If you haven't updated your app since about July 21, you may want to consider shipping an update of your app so the user can perform an update without removing your app and thus losing data. This update wouldn’t have to have any different functionality.


There should be no further identifierForVendor changes once a user updates your app after about July 21 unless the user removes all of your apps and then reinstalls one of them, or if they restore their device from a backup created on a different device. These are the documented cases where identifierForVendor is expected to change.


If you see any behavior other than what I’ve described, please file a bug report about it at <https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting> so we can investigate.

Replies

I've also submitted a bug for the identifierForVendor problem and Apple replied (08-Jul-2015) that this "issue" has been addressed in the latest iOS 9 beta. Made some quick tests and it seems like our app are receives the same identifierForVendor on devices using iOS9 Beta, at least when we are updating the app using promo-codes. Have someone else received the same answer and been able to comfirm that identifierForVendor remains intact when using the latest release of iOS9 Beta?

What's even worst with this is that if you have iCloud with CoreData your users have a huge risk of losing data.


CoreData stack with iCloud creates a folder named "mobile~_identifierForVendor_" where it puts the sqlite file. On app update, the identifierForVendor changes, and a new sqlite gets created with a different path: this isn't a big deal as far as users had enabled iCloud, the data would just get downloaded again. However, if the users DOESN'T have iCloud enabled, this is a mess because the old file cannot be found anymore, and data is there but unavailable.


I wrote to the technical support and they told me that this is a known issue, it shouldn't happen and it was going to be fixed server-side


Anyone else is having the same issue?

We're definitely seeing the same behaviour, across a range of different devices. It only seems to happen for a minority of users when updating the app. But it is clearly happening. There's no ad hoc or other install methods going on; users are definitely just updating, not deleting and re-installing. It's very frustrating that this feature does not work as documented.

There was an issue recently where apps were being given an incorrect identifierForVendor when they were installed or updated. This was a bug that was introduced near the beginning of May. Around July 21, the App Store completed the process of restoring the identifierForVendor of apps that experienced this bug to the value it had before the bug was introduced.


Apps that were installed or upgraded while this bug was present will see one more identifierForVendor change the next time the user updates or reinstalls the app after about July 21 but it will be a value the app had used before. (The data used to compute identifierForVendor is delivered along with app installations or updates.)


IMPORTANT: This means that you may get random reports about this issue because it only appears when the user updates your app.


If you haven't updated your app since about July 21, you may want to consider shipping an update of your app so the user can perform an update without removing your app and thus losing data. This update wouldn’t have to have any different functionality.


There should be no further identifierForVendor changes once a user updates your app after about July 21 unless the user removes all of your apps and then reinstalls one of them, or if they restore their device from a backup created on a different device. These are the documented cases where identifierForVendor is expected to change.


If you see any behavior other than what I’ve described, please file a bug report about it at <https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting> so we can investigate.

@gc just to know, can you confirm that this problem have also affected CoreData + iCloud support, due to mobile~<identifierOnVendor> folder changes on updates, and that now it is solved too?

So... thats why I got a dozen of complains ... 😟 darn, spent a week trying to figure out this madness...

I'm sorry to revive such an old thread but we're currently having issues with our app updates that relate to this. We have updated 3 of our apps last november and, since then, our testing has been reporting bugs relating to identifierForVendor changing. Even when testing with TestFlight updating over an AppStore build, I am noticing the id being different. This behaviour has never been noticed before by QA so I'm worried releasing an update might break certain identifierForVendor-dependant features for our current userbase.


Have you had reports about this lately from other developers? What could have caused this change? We have many other of our apps installed on our devices so there is no reason why it would reset for our updates.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that our application has iCloud support and we're seeing this when iCloud is disabled on the device. Could this be related?

Thanks

Hey! I think I might be experiencing this problem. Do you still have an issue with this?


Cheers!

Hi nailer, we have shipped our game that had the ID changes during testing and we have not noticed any ID change after updating with the new store version over an old store version. For some reason, when testing, the ID is different than the one on the store build ... So, for us, all is well now! I have coded a mechanism to prevent future ID changes because something tells me this feature isn't as reliable as it is advertised.