Identify whether HTTP requests from Android App or not? and then respond appropriately

Question

My Android App has an App Widget associated with it which is updated every 10 minutes on an Android Device. These updates send HTTP requests for data to the servers and parse th

Answer 1

The typical way of doing this is using the User-Agent header in the HTTP request. if the request comes from the standard browser, it will uniquely identify both the hardware and software. For example a Nexus One running Froyo will have the following User-Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

However, if you're using HttpClient to make requests from your app, you can customise the User-Agent header that HttpClient uses as demonstrated in this answer: Android HTTP User Agent.

On the server-side you can use a regex match on the user-Agent header to determine whether a request has originated from your Android app, and send the appropriate response.