IDFA not tracked on iOS Simulator

For engineers Tracking SDKs
1

Hey,

I need to track the IDFA of iOS devices that use my wrapped snowplow package (The snowplow package is a transitive dependency). I’ve followed all the instructions mentioned in the following link but still wasn’t able to track IDFA: Advanced usage | Snowplow Documentation

Here are some screenshots to aid my question:

The events are being triggered from the viewDidAppear() method in ViewController.

Could you help me track the IDFA, I’m new to iOS development.

Thank you,
Siv

2

It looks like on iOS simulator getting a null IDFA (all zeroes) is the expected behaviour.

The advertising identifier returns all zeros (00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000) in the following cases:

  • In Simulator, regardless of any settings.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidentifiermanager/1614151-advertisingidentifier

3

Hey @mike ,

Yes, I’ve learnt that on simulator its tracked as zero’s but in the database the IDFA is tracked as null.
Is this normal? Also, I’ve set ‘SNOWPLOW_NO_IDFV’ to 1, which means this shouldn’t be tracked, but it is being tracked.
image

4

Hey,

I’ve got hold of a physical device but still not able to track IDFA for iOS.

Any suggestions?

Thank you,
Siv

5

Hi @siv,

Could you let us know which version of the iOS tracker are you using?

The way that the IDFA is fetched by the tracker has changed in version 5 – instead of using the precompiler flags, it is now provided by the app in a callback in the tracker configuration. You can read more in the documentation here: Platform and application data tracking | Snowplow Documentation

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