Detect legacy iOS device through user-agent

[JLasso]

Good afternoon,

We need to create a badge that will be assigned to users from legacy Apple handsets. We know that the user agent can be used to detect the user device, but there are plenty of combinations of software and hardware that makes this process hard. For example, a Chrome browser on an iPhone 6 will introduce itself using a different user agent than a Safari browser on the same phone. (Here for iphone 7)

Do you know a process of detecting the user device (particularly for legacy Apple hansets)? We tend to think this needs to be done through iQ.

Best regards,

Jose

[GavinAttard · Accepted solution]

HI @JLasso 

You are on the right path, as in it is a task of matching user agent details to a model/device/version...

You can either try maintain a look up yourself in iQ (not really feasable...). 

or use an api that can return the data for you in iQ.  

It's also worth adding that apple devices don't generally share model-specific data in user agent. In particulatr updates to iOS 12.2 restricted further the capabilities of determining model. 

[JLasso]

Hi @GavinAttard,

Thank you very much for your answer, it was really helpful.

By now, we have established a manual load rule in Audience Stream to detect the iPhone models we were interested in thanks to the regular expressions contained here (device-detector: The Universal Device Detection library for parsing User Agents). Of course, we could not map the regular expressions exactly as we would have wanted, we just generated a general load rule to get most of devices.

You referred to an API to return this data in iQ, could you provide us of more details on this? It could be a more robust solution for this problem in the future.

Best regards,

Jose

[GavinAttard]

Pleasure @JLasso 

From an api perspective there are a few vendors, i have not had direct use of any of them, so cannot provide more insight on any specific one. 

However a quick google on 'device detection api' returns a good list for you to peruse. 

implementation is on the same lines as a reverse ip providor.