After the storm, comes the calm.

That's the situation the mobile advertising and monetisation industry finds itself in over the use of UDIDs.

Everyone's now providing a replacement solution, but this is just the end of the beginning.

The smarter outfits are looking towards how a long term solution to device tracking can expand the entire business, in terms of integrating across apps and web, as well as being more transparent in terms of user privacy.

Analytics company Kontagent is looking ahead too.

It's the prime mover behind MATA - Mobile Acquisition Transparency Alliance.

Fractured data

Backed by Chartboost, Playhaven and MdotM, the organisation hopes to deal with the fragmentation of data sources that mobile developers now suffer from.

"On mobile, there's device fragmentation, traffic fragmentation and SDK fragmentation," explains Kontagent's director of product marketing, Aaron Huang.

"On Facebook, you have access to your activity across 800 million users on one dashboard. That's not the case with mobile."

Streamlined approach

The plan is to enable monetisation companies to coalesce around a single API - called Open API - which will act as a universal channel into which multiple proprietary data feeds can be integrated.

This will enable developers to more easily access their data, in turn allowing them to make better business decisions.

"We hear stories that developers are spending up to 20 percent of the working week trying to ingest their data," Huang says.

"Even with just our first three partners, people will use Open API. I think the opportunity cost if you're not using it is already high enough."

Kontagent is also in talks with "most of the large ad networks" who Huang says are open to the concept; the promise of more customers and better reporting being a win-win situation.

"We're not trying to own Open API; it's open source," he says. "We're trying to deal with one of the key pain points in the industry by standardising reporting."

Double whammy

As for the current issue of UDIDs, Huang says MATA is agnostic.

"We still use UDIDs at the moment, but we can use whatever identifier the industry decides to rally around," he says.

As a company, Kontagent has its own anonymous ID system that will support the use of MAC address, ODIN, OpenUDID, SecureUDID etc in the short term.

But Huang argues it's the right time for the issue to be solved.

"Apple never intended UDIDs to be used in the way they're being used," he says.

His hope is that over the coming months, the industry will sort out the ID issue, with MATA dealing with reporting.

"The mobile app community needs to move to standardised IDs and standardised reporting" Huang states.

"UDIDs and data fragmentation are an opportunity for us all to improve the industry."

You can find out more about MATA via its website.