Uniquely identify the current device
In this post, we’ll look at how to uniquely identify the current device. We’ll also look at different ways of persisting the unique identifier to make it available even if the app is uninstalled.
The basics
Uniquely identifying a device is not straightforward, since there is no such thing on iOS. You can get the device name with UIDevice.current.name but chances are that John's iPhone is not that unique.
You can use UUID().uuidString to generate a unique identifier, but we then need to persist it so it doesn’t change every time we ask for it. The most obvious way to persist the identifier is to generate it the first time the app asks for it, then persist it in UserDefaults and return the persisted value.
This works well enough, but the identifier will be regenerated as soon as the user deletes and reinstalls the app. This may cause the same device to use multiple unique identifiers.
Instead of UserDefaults, we could store the data in the device keychain, to make sure that it’s still around even if the user reinstalls the app. I wrote about the keychain in this blog post.
Depending on your access strategy, keychain persistency is not 100% reliable, since you may choose a strategy that requires the device to be unlocked, have a passcode etc.
You should therefore use both approaches to get a solution that uses UserDefaults when possible and falls back to the keychain whenever needed.
Device identifiers
To simplify working with device identifiers, I have created a couple of components that solves the task in various ways. I first have a small DeviceIdentifier protocol that describes how to get the identifier:
public protocol DeviceIdentifier: AnyObject {
func getDeviceIdentifier() -> String
}
extension DeviceIdentifier {
var key: String { "com.swiftkit.deviceidentifier" }
}
I then create a protocol implementation that generates an identifier the first time the function is called, then uses UserDefaults to store the identifier and return it from then on:
public class UserDefaultsBasedDeviceIdentifier: DeviceIdentifier {
public init(defaults: UserDefaults = .standard) {
self.defaults = defaults
}
private let defaults: UserDefaults
public func getDeviceIdentifier() -> String {
if let id = defaults.string(forKey: key) { return id }
return generateDeviceIdentifier()
}
}
private extension UserDefaultsBasedDeviceIdentifier {
func generateDeviceIdentifier() -> String {
let id = UUID().uuidString
defaults.set(id, forKey: key)
return id
}
}
To add keychain persistency, I create a separate service that tries to fetch the information from the keychain, but fallback to another service (by default the user defaults service) if the keychain is empty:
public class KeychainBasedDeviceIdentifier: DeviceIdentifier {
public init(
keychainService: KeychainService,
backupIdentifier: DeviceIdentifier = UserDefaultsBasedDeviceIdentifier()) {
self.keychainService = keychainService
self.backupIdentifier = backupIdentifier
}
private let backupIdentifier: DeviceIdentifier
private let keychainService: KeychainService
public func getDeviceIdentifier() -> String {
if let id = keychainService.string(for: key, with: nil) { return id }
let id = backupIdentifier.getDeviceIdentifier()
keychainService.set(id, for: key, with: nil)
return id
}
}
This service uses a KeychainService, which I wrote about yesterday in this post.
We now have two different ways of handling the unique identifier. If regeneration is not a problem for your app, you can just use the user defaults-based one, otherwise you can use the keychain-based one.
Source code
I have added these extensions to my SwiftKit library. You can find the source code here. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think!
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