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How do I identify a specific mobile device?
How do I identify a specific mobile device?

Add the user identifier to locate devices faster

Jordi Giménez avatar
Written by Jordi Giménez
Updated over 10 months ago

Every device in Bugfender has a unique identifier, but you can associate extra data to a device in order to identify it easily.

Custom device data

If you want to associate a value (String, Integer, Boolean or Float) to a device you can do it with:

Bugfender.setDeviceString("user.email", "[email protected]");
Bugfender.setDeviceInteger("user.photo.image.width", 600);
Bugfender.setDeviceBoolean("user.is.logged", true);
Bugfender.setDeviceFloat("user.children", 3);

Also you can remove a specific value associated with the device, you can remove it with:

Bugfender.removeDeviceKey("user.children");

Please note there is a limit of 32 custom keys. Keys can be up to 128 bytes long and values up to 192 bytes long.

How custom keys are seen in Bugfender's UI

Custom keys are shown in the device list as well as in the log viewer:

You can use these details to find the device easily:

Bugfender identifier

Also Bugfender generates a random identifier for each mobile device that has your application installed. This is generated during the first execution and stored in the internal memory for next executions.

You can get that identifier using the getDeviceURL method, so that you can show it on screen, link it in your customer support solution or send it to your server. The device URL can be opened in a browser to jump directly to the logs of this device (authentication required).

Android ID

On Android, the device serial number is not reliable enough because it can be changed for a specific device or sometimes happened that multiple devices have the same one, but Bugfender collects this ID automatically as the custom key $android_id. You can use it to find a device by Android ID if you want.

Searching for devices

You can find devices using both the Bugfender identifier or any custom data you have associated to the device. You can learn more about searching here.

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