Author Archives: Yann Lechelle

UDID is dead, OpenUDID is deprecated, long live advertisingIdentifier!

By Yann Lechelle | Published: June 7, 2013

[note: this is technical post for iOS developers, publishers and ad networks] Do you remember all the fuss about UDID? Yup, the dust has settled on this one, like most things. But today is the right day to revive the topic! UDID tracking posed a number of ethical and user privacy concerns a few years [...]

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Reaching for the sky, shooting stars… or the cost of a crashing app!

By Yann Lechelle | Published: September 17, 2012

We told you so before, we’re obsessed with ratings, rankings, so much that we’ve created our own all encompassing App Score; the reason we care so much is partly because we have a very successful iOS app out there, used by millions of users, with near religious recurrence - and we keep tabs on general [...]

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Evolution of OpenUDID and iOS 6

By Yann Lechelle | Published: August 28, 2012

OpenUDID is taking a radical turn with the arrival of iOS 6. The specifics of the turn cannot really be exposed at this stage given the fact that the instigator is bound to the pre-release iOS 6 NDA (in effect until iOS 6 is released sometime this fall). That being said, for those who either [...]

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OpenUDID - for the record

By Yann Lechelle | Published: June 7, 2012

OpenUDID is an independent and open-source effort; nevertheless, Appsfire is by default the primary sponsor of this effort, with one single goal: to try and help the mobile advertising industry at large to navigate the post UDID-deprecation era. From time to time, journalists come to us with questions. Here is a compiled Q & A. [...]

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Better advertising by aligning with user mindset: Google vs. Facebook vs. Appsfire

By Yann Lechelle | Published: May 20, 2012

Chris Dixon has a point when he analyses that Google is more efficient at monetizing AdWords than Facebook monetizing display ads despite a much greater number of page views. We believe that the Appsfire model binds very well with that argument: our advertising model is directly aligned with the intent of our users. Indeed, Appsfire [...]

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OpenUDID reaching critical mass adoption

By Yann Lechelle | Published: April 25, 2012

OpenUDID adoption has accelerated in the past few weeks and seems to have reached a sort of critical mass. In fact, a study by Fiksu shows OpenUDID as the most widely adopted “universal” alternatives (i.e. one that does not presupposed prior agreement between parties). The picture featured on the OpenUDID GitHub (below) shows a variety of [...]

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OpenUDID - now is the time!

By Yann Lechelle | Published: March 25, 2012

We’ve covered this issue before, preemptively. But now is the time to act! Some reports have emerged that Apple is now massively rejecting apps that still use the “[UIDevice uniqueIdentifier]” a.k.a. the UDID (Unique Device IDentifier). This means that developers have two choices: drop using this entirely, or find a replacement. Some have gone the [...]

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With UDID nearing its demise, leading industry players turn to OpenUDID

By Yann Lechelle | Published: February 21, 2012

With the introduction of iOS 5, Apple implicitly indicated that it will soon remove the ability for developers to access the unique device identifier, also known as UDID. While not the most important API in the entire iOS SDK, many in the app ecosystem have grown dependent on this UDID, for legitimate aggregate measurement needs, not [...]

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The perfect 5-star app?

By Yann Lechelle | Published: February 9, 2012

Making great apps is so hard. We’re never sure we manage to do it right. But we strive to. And today, it is with great amazement that we discover what our effort has led to… We try to stay humble and we iterate a lot, we incorporate user feedback, we look at stats, we iterate [...]

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Inter-app communication and the future of app (re)discovery

By Yann Lechelle | Published: January 23, 2012

  This post is fairly technical in nature, but also fairly accessible. Inter-app communication is still in its infancy. Indeed, as powerful software publishers would have it, each app or each suite of apps would attempt to lock users into a unique file format to achieve a sort of monopole. This is clearly what Microsoft [...]

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