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Luke Larson avatar image
Luke Larson asked

How to handle a resold device?

Apologies if this question is answered elsewhere but I couldn't find much reference to it.

My question has to do with a user that has created an account with a device id, linking it with a third party service, before wiping their data and selling their phone.

Now another person has downloaded your game after buying the phone and is automatically logged into PlayFab using (I assume?) that same device id. Is this the case in that the device id is intrinsically tied to the hardware?

I obviously don't want a new owner of a device to have access to linked third party accounts of the previous owner of the device. What is the correct way to handle this?

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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Yes, that's one of the reasons we added the Custom ID. While many devices change ID at least on a factory reset (and iOS devices generate a unique ID when a player installs your app/game on a device with no other apps/games from you), there are some that don't. So a resold device could result in someone being able to log into a pre-existing game. Obviously, this is something of a corner case, as it would require that the new owner download and play your games - but I do mean "games", not "game", since the account is at the Publisher ID level, which is shared by all games in your Studio by default.

So one approach would be to generate a unique ID, save it locally, and use that as a Custom ID. You lose out on some data if you go that route, though - knowing which of your players are using which device types is information that could help you in future planning. So at a minimum, I'd recommend also firing a custom event on the player's first sign-in, to log data on the device specifics.

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Luke Larson avatar image Luke Larson commented ·

Perfect thank you Brandon for the clarification!

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