Those of you into iPhone development or jailbreaking are probably not going to enjoy this one – latest claims say that Apple is getting ready to phase out the UDID in iOS 5. But what does that mean for all of us?

For those of you who don’t know, UDID stands for Unique Device Identifier. It’s a number that’s assigned to your phone when it’s made, and is completely unique – no other phone has that number. Kind of like a Social Security Number.

The UDID can be used for many good things – for example, the UDID is the reason you can delete a game and download it again, and still have your saved files. The developer can save your unique phone identification along with the statistics the game needs to know about your phone, so it seems like you never left off. However, your UDID can also be used for evil. Some apps – a lot of apps, actually – transmit your identification number to advertising services. Advertising services can then easily use it to track what apps you buy and how you use your phone – and a lot of people don’t like that.

This is likely the reason that Apple is phasing it out – with all the scandal that happened a few months ago when the public freaked out about location tracking, Apple probably doesn’t want to have anything to do with any sort of tracking again. However, it’s still unsure how Apple will get around the problem – developers still need some sort of way to identify users to track high scores and save data in the cloud.

While it won’t have huge effect on the average consumer, the developer and the jailbreaker may want to watch out! This could affect the inner-workings of apps in new ways.