Defaulting to smartphone as compared to feature phone

[kjatin]

Hi Team,

For the following UA, WURFL library detects as a feature phone. However it is meant to be detected as a smart phone. I know that this would get fixed in the upcoming release of WURFL and understand that I could patch for the meanwhile.

I wanted to know if it is possible to always detect something as a smartphone as opposed to feature phone when in doubt or some new UA (default to smartphone always). This helps whenever there is a new UA (like a latest iOS version) and WURFL is not yet updated, because more often than not, new valid UA would be a smartphone and not a feature phone. Also, detecting it as feature phone when it is a smart phone, will impact smartphone users. And the other way round it would affect featurephone users. So to keep the impact low spread, would it make sense to affect feature phone users v/s smartphone users?

Example UA: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_0 like Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15A5354b UCBrowser/10.9.1.998 Mobile

Thanks,
Jatin

[amark]

Hi Jatin,

I wanted to let you know that the example UA is detected in WURFL and it is important to to keep your WURFL xml file as well as the API up to date in order to receive the best detection. If you would like the documentation on the WURFL Updater for the product you are using I would be happy to provide it. While we often have the latest iOS UAs before the launch of the new version of iOS I understand why you are worried about detecting an actual smartphone as a feature phone. In most cases undetected phones will correctly be categorized as smartphones. However in edge cases some UAs will be categorized as a feature phone which is the intended behavior of WURFL. While we can not make this change that would affect all ScientiaMobile customers we can provide a patch file for you that would have the behavior you expect. Feel free to send us an e-mail at support@scientiamobile.com if you are interested in this solution so I can further assist you.

Best,
Amar
Mobile Data Analyst
ScientiaMobile

[kjatin]

Hi Amar,

Thanks for your prompt reply. I am happy to read that you provide updates for most of the browsers before they are actually launched. However there would be cases where the lesser know browsers are not tracked rigorously for updates and understandably so. For example in the UA provided which was a UCBrowser. While this browser is not a famous in many locales, but considerably popular in India. You mentioned that undetected phones are defaulted to smart phones. However this UA in particular was marked as feature phone (until the latest update), why was it not defaulted to smartphone?

As far as updating the latest of the API is concerned, I appreciate that updates are pushed regularly from your end, but even after that there is a process on our end which may not always keep the API updated as it brings some operational overhead. So won't this defaulting behaviour in general help most customers of yours considering not everyone would update very often (considering the speed with which new UA come into market).

I am happy to explore the patch file process for this and send a mail soon, but may be this can be re-thought for a inbuilt behaviour as well.

Thanks,
Jatin

[amark]

Hi Jatin,

As previously mentioned there are edge cases where unknown smartphone UAs are detected as feature phones. While I understand this is not the ideal behavior for these smartphones the behavior is intended in order to not overstate the capabilities of an unknown device. I will talk to my engineers and mention your concerns however I can not say if we will change the logic with how we deal with unknown UAs for all our customers. With that said it is very possible to make all unknown UCBrowser UAs default to smartphones with a patch file if this is the behavior you expect. If this interests you or you have a different behavior in mind I would be happy to discuss this with you more through email (support@scientiamobile.com) to help generate a patch file to your liking.

Best,
Amar
Mobile Data Analyst
ScientiaMobile