Stop it.
You won't see any ad units that you don't like disappear - the transaction point for the advertiser will just be the click rather than the install.
This is only going to push the industry away from the heavily favored CPI pricing to CPC pricing.
But, more nefariously (again, if my understanding is correct) it’s saying that many ad networks rely on this info being passed to advertisers (despite the policy being that it shouldn’t), and how problematic it’s going to be if Apple enforces this policy.
If this is the case, my sympathy is close to zero. Not because “advertising = bad”, but because this was a known no-no. Don’t cry foul when you can’t do what you were told you couldn’t.
Of course this all ignores the possibility of creating user accounts or generating a unique identifier whenever the use installs the app, so maybe there is something more to it that I'm not understanding. Because I tend to agree with you, that developers shouldn't be doing something with user data that is prohibited.
Which is exactly what Apple recommended when they stopped letting apps get a hold of the UDID.
I can't think of a really good legit reason for wanting a cross-app unique ID.
For a contrast to Android you just need to read this article: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140130170002-11...
From my perspective it seems that Apple wants to have access to this data for iAds, but doesn't want any competition. It's been their normal behaviour recently, trying to eliminate any possibility of anyone competing with them in their markets. From wide device bans to price fixing conspiracies.
I've got a whole bunch of libs included, several of which use AdSupport. Arg.
Note that this affects quite a few major platforms:
* parse.com seems to have added it when they added social.framework for Facebook features
* TestFlight uses it for obvious reasons: https://testflightapp.com/sdk/ios/doc/2.0.0/ -- they add it even if you forget to.
* Mixpanel affected (with workaround above)
Not affected:
* AFAIK, Google doesn't use it unless you added it as a custom metric with your own custom code (or a third-party integration library)
* Flurry split off their advertising library from their analytics one, in part likely because of this requirement from Apple. If you implement just the analytics, it does not require AdSupport.framework.
