Uniquely identifying an iOS user

Question

I\'d like to create a user account on the server for new users of an app, but I\'d also like to not ask the user to type in anything. Ideally, I\'d like this to be automatic

Answer 1

Radu

Excellent question. We have resolved the issue you describe by integrating Urban Airship (urbanairship.com) into our apps. Urban Airship offers a grab bag of functionality to support in-app purchases, receipt validation, subscription recovery, content delivery, and Apple Push Notification.

One of the great things about Urban Airship is it's ability to identify a "user", not a device, but a "user" by email address. It's not really an advertised "feature"... more of a by-product of its intended functionality.

Here is what we have found and how we can leverage Urban Airship to solve the problem you have.

When a user installs your app that has Urban Airship integrated to it, UA somehow generates a UDID-like number, which at the moment, simply identifies the device.

However, if you leverage the subscription recovery components of Urban Airship you can have the user enter an email address. Once the user enters their email address on the first device... that generated ID becomes their main method of user identification and is associated with that email address. When they enter their email address on subsequent devices, Urban Airship will trigger an email validation process. Once the user completes the validation process it updates the ID on the new device to be the same as the ID of the first device and so on. The best part of it is... it's all auto-magic! You simply integrate the components and have the user enter their email address. You should be able to have it all up and working within an hour.

It also offers functionality to allow the user to change the email address associated with all of their devices.

We have actually implemented and it works VERY well!

NOTE: As of JULY 1st 2013 Urban Airship is deprecating the subscription & recovery functionality