I have an app on the market. When you start playing your device id is linked to your account so you don’t have to log in manually. For some time now a few people had a problem. They started logging in into different accounts. What seems to be the problem is that some devices give a null value when asked for device id. With a few accounts with a null device id, people were logging into different accounts.
I read that some devices will do that. But it seems that there was no problem during account creation and then playing for a while.
I know this is not the best method and google discourages using device ids since they can change on fabric reset.
Can a device for some reason stop giving its id(besides the fabric reset)?
Anyone know of a different way to identify the user with out him needing to put in a login or password?
Yes some phones have bugs in them where they will return NULL for Android ID. I think if you want to continue to use them you’ll always need a way to tie that handset to an account, email, username. That way if the Android ID is unrecognized they could login using their email or username, and password to associate them again. You’ll always have issues where someone buys a new phone and needs a way recover their account if you don’t.
A better option is every Android phone is attached to a Google account. And using the AccountManager class you can use those credentials to authenticate to your software automatically and the user doesn’t have to enter username/password. And you’e centralized their identity. Also with this method you don’t require the extra permissions to read data that has potential security issues too.