Released: SDK 4.12 for iOS, Windows and Android

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Today we’re pleased to announce a few new surprises, all wrapped up together with the launch of our SDK 4.12 for iOS, Android and Windows.

Our latest SDK comes with a range of new features for increased functionality, security, and protection against mobile ad fraud schemes. We’ll be rolling out these features in the coming weeks; to get ready for them, you must update your SDK to the latest version. Without the SDK 4.12, you will not be able to make use of all of these new updates.

Adjust is already the leader in the fight against mobile ad fraud, with the only suite of tools on the market that prevent fraud from ever getting into your data set, but our new updates take it a few steps further on multiple fronts. We’re also making it easier than it’s ever been before to track your apps in third-party stores, and providing you with the same security you’re used to when your apps appear in Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store.

Want an overview of all of the new features coming together with SDK 4.12? Read on:

Click injections filter

We’ve added a new tool to our Fraud Prevention Suite; our latest filter is designed to fight click injections, a fraud scheme that has grown to a significant level and magnified in viciousness over the past year.

Together, we’ve worked with Google to make more timestamps available; these timestamps give us greater insight into a user’s intent and actions, far more than we had before. The click injection filter utilizes those timestamps to reject fraudulent traffic via click injections based on behavior that falls well outside of the normal distribution curve of typical user behavior.

The timeline below shows when click injections normally take place during an app install:

The second timeline shows the same app install, with all of the new data points available:

You’ll find the click injections filter within the Fraud Prevention Suite as a standard on/off toggle titled ‘click injection filtering’. In order to take full advantage of the click injection filter, you must have the Fraud Prevention Suite enabled and run either the Native Android SDK or any of the derivative Android SDKs in version 4.12. **We strongly encourage you to update your SDK to the latest version in order to take advantage of this new technology. **

Simplifying attribution for third-party app stores

With the release of SDK 4.12, Adjust will be releasing attribution for third-party app stores. This is big news for China, where third-party stores rule a competitive, contested market. If you have an app in a third-party app store, we would strongly encourage you to update to SDK 4.12.

Previously, if you ran with multiple third-party stores, you would have had to set up separate APKs and implement separate default trackers within the SDK of each APK. Now, as long as third-party stores are able to support the passing of the referrer, we can correctly attribute to the specific campaign information they create on their end. This is set up the same way you would set up your referrer for the Google Play Store.

You can now be assured of accurate attribution no matter which third-party store you run with. The setup for attribution occurs in much the same way as with the Google Play Store. You will create a broadcast receiver; SDK 4.12 is configured so that once your broadcast receiver is set up, it will always catch the install_referrer intent and will always persist the referrer from that intent for use when the app opens. Everything inside the referrer is single encoded (if there are callbacks, they must be double encoded).

Attribution for pre-installed apps

The same solution for third-party app stores also applies to pre-installed apps on brand new devices. If you’d like to track apps that are pre-installed on new mobile devices, we would strongly encourage you to upgrade to SDK 4.12.

In the past, this was tricky: because one of our fraud filters relies on distribution modeling, and the time between ‘click’ and install can appear outside of what we would consider ‘normal’ user behavior, it was easy for attribution information from pre-installed apps to be falsely marked as fraudulent.

With SDK 4.12, we will not receive a ‘click’ when the device is first initialized. Instead we will use a different method which allows us to attribute the install without issue. When a new user installs the pre-installed app, the referrer will trigger an SDK click, which will adapt and carry resource information along with it.

SDK Signature for the ultimate security

With the new Adjust Signature, we’re creating a robust system designed to stop hackers. From now on, we’re making use of a more complex signature that you can set up in your dashboard to bring you the ultimately security from traffic spoofing.

If you’d like to utilize this new layer of security, we strongly suggest that you update to SDK 4.12 as soon as possible. Our SDK Signature feature will only be available for users of the latest version of our SDK.

Want to know exactly how our SDK Signature will function? Keep checking in with product updates for upcoming specs.

Want to learn more?

Check out the specs for SDK 4.12 and our new Google Referrer API Integration on GitHub.

For more information about any of these updates, please reach out to your account manager.