Identifying Devices
Suppose you feel that for the needs of your application, you need an actual hardware device identifier. This turns out to be a tricky problem.
In the past, when every Android device was a phone, things were simpler: TelephonyManager.getDeviceId()
is required to return (depending on the network technology) the IMEI,
MEID, or ESN of the phone, which is unique to that piece of hardware.
However, there are problems with this approach:
Non-phones: Wifi-only devices or music players that don’t have telephony hardware just don’t have this kind of unique identifier.
Persistence: On devices which do have this, it persists across device data wipes and factory resets. It’s not clear at all if, in this situation, your app should regard this as the same device.
Privilege:It requires READ_PHONE_STATE permission, which is irritating if you don’t otherwise use or need telephony.
Bugs: We have seen a few instances of production phones for which the implementation is buggy and returns garbage, for example zeros or asterisks.
Mac Address
It may be possible to retrieve a Mac address from a device’s WiFi or Bluetooth hardware. We do not recommend using this as a unique identifier. To start with, not all devices have WiFi. Also, if the WiFi is not turned on, the hardware may not report the Mac address.
Serial Number
Since Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”) this is available via android.os.Build.SERIAL. Devices without telephony are required to report a unique device ID here; some phones may do so also.
ANDROID_ID
More specifically, Settings.Secure.ANDROID_ID. This is a 64-bit quantity that is generated and stored when the device first boots. It is reset when the device is wiped.
ANDROID_ID seems a good choice for a unique device identifier. There are downsides: First, it is not 100% reliable on releases of Android prior to 2.2 (“Froyo”). Also, there has been at least one widely-observed bug in a popular handset from a major manufacturer, where every instance has the same ANDROID_ID.
Conclusion
For the vast majority of applications, the requirement is to identify a particular installation, not a physical device. Fortunately, doing so is straightforward.
There are many good reasons for avoiding the attempt to identify a particular device. For those who want to try, the best approach is probably the use of ANDROID_ID on anything reasonably modern, with some fallback heuristics for legacy devices.
출저 : http://android-developers.blogspot.kr/2011/03/identifying-app-installations.html