$device added to destrict_id

[CyberDK]

Hi

After the last release suddenly some of our destrict_id contains $device:
Is there a reason why this happens, it seems to be related to the commit below.

28d765c

[csiden]

This was a recent change made to the way the Mixpanel SDKs generate device-specific distinct IDs across all of our client-side SDKs. The prefix will be used by some upcoming features to know that this ID was generated by the SDK and is not a user-provided ID passed to identify(). These are the release notes from the Android SDK, but it also accurately describes the change in all the SDKs:

From this version, we will prefix randomly generated device-specific distinct_ids with "$device:". The prefix is applied the next time a new random ID is generated, any IDs generated by previous SDK versions and persisted on the device will continue to be used as-is until reset is called to generate a new ID. This does not change the value sent for the $device_id property, which will continue to be the randomly-generated ID without a prefix. Mixpanel's $identify endpoint has been updated to accept UUIDs with this prefix to coordinate with this change.

Apologies a similar release note wasn't added to this repo. I'll fix that today.

[CyberDK]

Thanks for your quick reply, is it possible to avoid this $device being added in the distinct_id, as you can see on the image below all new users gets this added.

We are using your GTM MixPanel template and not using your SDK packages.

[csiden]

The GTM Mixpanel template loads our JS SDK which is why you are seeing this. There is no way to disable this prefix on the random IDs generated by the SDK. Can I ask why you want to disable the prefix?