Difference in advertised_browser and mobile_browser

[ic10503]

So as to find the browserType for any device, I am wondering if I should look at mobile_browser capability or advertised_browser virtual capability. I see inconsistent behavior for same device if the user agent strings are a little different.

Like for Android Chrome for Galaxy Nexus device,
1. For user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; Galaxy Nexus Build/IMM76B) AppleWebKit/535.19(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.133 Mobile Safari/535.19
mobile_browser: Chrome Mobile
advertised_browser: Chrome Mobile

Where as for same device :
2. For the user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.1; en-us; Nexus 5 Build/JOP40D) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19
mobile_browser: Android Webkit
advertised_browser: Chrome Mobile


As you can see, for the 2nd user agent string, the mobile_browser is reported as AndroidWebkit. I was relying on mobile_browser capability for my testing but seems like it's not sufficient. I needed mobile_browser to be reported as "Chrome Mobile" as well. Please let me know which capability is more reliable and what's the recommended way to detect the browser type.

[Elliotfehr]

Hello,

The `advertised_browser` virtual capability will infer the browser based upon the User Agent string whereas the `mobile_browser` capability will return the browser as it exists in the WURFL database. For your use case, I would recommend using the virtual capability `advertised_browser`.

Thank you,

Elliot

[ic10503]

Thanks Elliot, I understand that you recommend using advertised_browser capability. But for this user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.3; ko-kr; LG-L160L Build/IML74K) AppleWebkit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30

I see that these values are:
advertised_browser:Android
mobile_browser: Android Webkit

I am still very confused as to which capability to really look at. Can you please help me here ?

[Elliotfehr]

Thank you for letting us know. We will be creating an update to our API and cloud service in early April that will include more specific advertised_browser support for Android devices.

When released, you can expect to receive "Android WebKit" or "Chromium" as the advertised_browser for Android stock browsers.

Thank you,

Elliot