Identifying specific IOS device types

[mycrowd_admin]

Hi I am using the Ruby client to hit the cloud api.

I am having a problem identifying the particular model of iPhone and iPad devices. The data returned simply has model_name equal to either 'IPhone' or 'IPad' but does not contain information about whether it is an IPhone 4S, IPhone 5, IPad Mini, IPad 2, etc.

Also the marketing_name attribute is always blank.

Using an IPad Mini running IOS 8.1 I get the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B466 Safari/600.1.4

The data returned from the API is:

{
"apiVersion":"WurflCloud 1.5.0.2",
"mtime":1420484890,
"id":"apple_ipad_ver1_sub8_1",
"capabilities" : {
"brand_name":"Apple",
"model_name":"iPad",
"marketing_name":"",
"device_os":"iOS",
"device_os_version":8.1,
"mobile_browser":"Safari"
},
"errors":{}
}

Using an IPhone 5S running IOS 8.1 I get this user agent sting:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B466 Safari/600.1.4

The API returns the following data:

{
"apiVersion":"WurflCloud 1.5.0.2",
"mtime":1420484666,
"id":"apple_iphone_ver8_1",
"capabilities":{
"brand_name":"Apple",
"model_name":"iPhone",
"marketing_name":"",
"device_os":"iOS",
"device_os_version":8.1,
"mobile_browser":"Safari"
},
"errors":{}
}

Is there some other capability that will give me the specific version of IPhone or IPad? In other posts in the forum I sometimes see that data in the marketing_name attribute, but in my tests it is always empty.

Thanks

[Elliotfehr]

Hello,

This is due to how Apple has chosen to identify their devices via their User Agent string. They have gone to great lengths in order to hide any of their device information from their User Agents, which makes it very difficult to return the model of iPhone. Only inferences can be made from the iOS version to determine what type of iPhone it is purely using server side techniques.

However, our WURFL.js solution combines User Agent detection with client side feature detection in JavaScript, which allows for improved detection of iOS devices. This blog post provides some further details in regards to the issue of detection iOS devices.


Thank you,

Elliot

[mycrowd_admin]

Thanks Elliot,
I thought that might be the case. I will give the JS solution a try when I have the bandwidth.