Goodbye UDID

The app world woke up a few days back with a scare when news about Apple going through with its UDID deprecation plan hit the industry. While this definitely has substantial effects on a lot of app developers and companies that provide services using UDID, it is not new information as this idea has been floating around for over 6 months. At InMobi, we respect the decision to deprecate the UDID keeping in mind the privacy of users. We are in the business to provide value add to users and any solution which can potentially compromise the privacy is a big no-no for us. However, it is important for companies working with ad networks to understand how the deprecation of UDID can affect them. Currently, most ad networks use UDID to provide a whole gamut of product offerings, which will all begin to fail in the lack of UDID. Without an alternative, the impact will be seen on both the advertiser and publisher front. InMobi has been working on a UDID free solution for our Publishers and Advertisers ever since the potential connection of UDID and privacy concerns emerged. We have invested time in finding a solution that will have long-term benefits rather than a quick-fix solution to the problem at hand. I am happy to announce that we will be rolling out this new solution to all our partners shortly. So, both publisher and advertisers working with us will be offered the new solution that they can adopt at the earliest. With the changes that we have in store, UDID will be a thing of the past. But what's more exciting is the additional features that we will be rolling out with the new solution. I do not want to trivialize the impact of UDID deprecation, but honestly, we have been expecting this for a while and have been gearing ourselves up to the eventuality. Hence, it doesn't come as a big surprise. Rather, I look at it as an opportunity for publisher and advertisers to revisit the services they are getting from ad networks and get more than what they have previously been getting. The first in line UDID-free solution is for our Publisher. Click here to read what our developer evangelist has to say.